The Beautiful Indifference by Sarah Hall (2011)
Recommended by Rebecca Bream
I love short stories. They don't take
long to read, after all. When it's been a cow of week – as my last
one has with work – reading one on the way home is always a treat. When
they're good, they're lovely half-hours of pleasure,
like an episode of a soap opera when you've just got in, or a hot bath with your favourite magazine. In Sarah Hall's
case though, these half-hours usually involve bigger, fuller language,
and far fewer ads.
Rebecca Bream – Beck – recommended
me this book. She's not long had her second son, and told me she
lapped this up. Beck is cool as fuck, calm, funny, and an Actual
Proper Journalist, someone who's worked down diamond mines and oil
rigs while I've been at home in my 'jamas. My fondest memories are
her are at my wedding, simultaneously DJing and dancing to The Breeders on a bench in stockinged feet. Aso, if you want a crash course in getting to the front of a moshpit, with charm rather than bother, then Beck's your girl.
Booker Prize-shortlisted and
longlisted, Sarah Hall is also an impressive woman. Her four novels up to now (I say confidently, having had a quick scan through her website) have
explored the destruction of 1930s Cumbria, dystopian sci-fi, the
world of fine art, and a man who leaves Morecambe Bay for Coney
Island. This is her first book of short
stories, and I'll admit here and now that I found few of them tough. Hall
writes the kind of prose that book reviewers call “luminous” –
a metaphor that's always stuck in my craw, because words don't bloody
glow. But she does describe nature in bright colours, and with plenty
of texture.
Take the first page of The Nightlong
River. It involves “November berries...hung and clotted in the
bushes, ripe and red, like blisters of blood”. “Yarrow and rowan”
hanging out “their own gaudy bunting”. Hawthorns sending “the
hedgerows as ruddy as battle”. Typing those phrases out now, they
read beautifully, don't they? I suppose what I wanted from that story
from the start was more pace – a plot that grabbed me straightaway, that didn't take its merry time to gently
weave me in. I also realise this shows my flaws as a
reader, much more than it shows Sarah Hall's as a writer.
I wasn't surprised to find out that
Sarah Hall's also a poet. As well as that fulsome, visual stuff she
conjures up, she's always leaving little mysteries that never get
solved. I loved the book's title story (are they called title stories?) and how Hall slowly unravelled the tale of its protagonist and her lover – but never completely. I also gobbled up The Agency, which I suddenly realise was another saucy
offering. No, I haven't – and won't – read Fifty Shades Of Grey,
but I bet this is ruder and filthier. Rather than disclosing the
mucky details that are suggested within it, we find our protagonist
going into her living room, hours later, to “clear up the
children's mess”. The gaps in our knowledge aren't filled. We're
allowed imaginations.
My favourite story was Bees,
about a woman who'd just moved to London, which began with her
sitting in a garden, thinking about the dead insects around her.
Typical me, really: it's the second shortest story here. But its
description of a character losing something – still wanting
something they shouldn't really have – captured feelings I'd once
had, so powerfully, so dramatically, that I found myself suddenly standing up between Tottenham Hale and Blackhose Road.
I mean, that's a proper short story, isn't it? I'll definitely allow Sarah more time. One of these days – she says, contemplating next week's book with fear – I might even allow myself some.
