Across her three Comma Press collections – Dr James Graham’s Celestial Bed (2006), Lifting the Piano with One Hand (2013) and, especially, Where the Road Runs Out (2018) – Gaia Holmes’s poetry has burned with a unique free spirit, content-, form- and sensibility-wise. Her poems are unlike anyone else’s, filled with unlikely, netherworldly events frequently set on the fringes of society but which are real and compelling.
In this collection of 19 stories, Holmes’s first foray into fiction, many of the characters are neurodivergent and/or getting a raw deal out of life: bullying, toxic relationships, domestic violence, bereavement, conception difficulties, loneliness, terrible neighbours and a general sense of passivity which these problems cause or exacerbate. However, many of the stories concern ways in which those characters, through their own willpower or with some magical realist intervention, circumvent their circumstances. In her writing, Holmes is careful to avoid the trap of overtly feeling sorry for her characters and often does so by employing a first-person narrator who just tells it as it is.
The collection begins with the excellent title story, in which a recently-widowed woman, gradually revealing how her husband died, struggles with depression arising from her loss:
Grief and the weight of the secret are whittling me away, sucking the fat and the hope off my bones. Eating is a chore because I have no appetite and since that night I’ve been finding it hard to swallow and can’t cope with anything that crunches. If anyone asks why, I tell them that the trauma weakened my teeth. I live on soup and soft, quiet things: trifle, Shippams pastes on cheap white bread, rice puddings, tubs of prawn cocktail. I avoid potatoes.
For readers acquainted with the poems packed with grief in Where the Road Runs Out, this will be familiar terrain. As with a good few of the stories here though, to say much more plot-wise would be to spoil the reader’s surprise.
‘Shadow Play’ is one of several stories overtly set during the Covid pandemic, and one of a couple featuring power cuts too. It’s a beautiful tale of a grandfather with dementia and how his five-year-old granddaughter’s frustration at his memory failure and lack of engagement is briefly but joyously overcome.
Perhaps the book’s most complex story is ‘Unloved Flowers’, which travels back and forward through the challenges faced by its protagonist Connor, a night-time security guard at a garden centre who encounters and befriends, or is befriended by, a resident of a small tent city. In a memory of his ‘Granny Amy’, her affection for dandelions is revealed:
She explained to him that though roses were beautiful, fragrant, well-loved flowers, dandelions had so many more tricks, like soft little medicine cabinets. In spring, she drank dandelion tea for her blood and her ‘waterworks’. In winter, she drank dandelion wine for her spirit. In dandelion season, she took him out to gather what she called the ‘food of the gods’ and as they picked, she’d tell him the story of Theseus, the Greek hero who defeated the Minotaur. Before the defeat, in order to build up his strength, the Goddess Hecate fed Theseus dandelion salads for 30 days. Connor used to nibble on the bitter leaves as a teenager, hoping they’d make him stronger and braver, bring his voice back.
This is remarkable, imaginative writing, isn’t it? First of all, the paying of so much attention to a flower usually dismissed as a weed, and then that peculiar and really quite marvellous simile, ‘like soft little medicine cabinets’: the two adjectives work in combination to soften the hard edges of the physical objects and provide metaphorical panaceas as well as those provided by the uses of the dandelions. The narrative turns into Greek Mythology and then back to the contemporary life of Connor, silenced by years of bullying, are equally astonishing.
Another stand-out story, ‘Universal Stain Remover’, relates how a house-sitter goes above and beyond by not only cleaning and disinfecting everywhere – ‘those places that are neglected’ – but also dealing with long-lingering stains, noting how they resemble other things and even studying the science of stains:
I have tried almost every product on the market and created my own concoctions. I have successfully removed oil, sauce, ink, sweat and other bodily secretions. I have learned the timbre and nature of stains, how they spread and set and the direction they needle themselves into fabrics. I myself am made of stains.
It emerges that the stains are a metaphor for the controlling behaviour of an ex-partner. Suffice it to say that the story takes an intriguing turn of events.
In ‘Ratguts and Lola’, Holmes explores the perils of hitchhiking but does so hilariously. The humour in the collection as a whole is droll, occasionally daft and occasionally dark, as it is in real life; and it’s all part and parcel of Holmes’s skill at getting under the skin of modern life in the north of England (and both explicitly and implicitly beyond) after years of Tory Government-inflicted austerity.
‘Until the Batteries Run Out’ brings us Clara, who, bereft by the cot death of her daughter, sits in the dark drinking G&Ts. The ending of the story is beautiful and full of tender hopefulness.
Holmes’s presumably personal, bitter experience of being part of the protest against the infamous felling of many trees in order to build a bypass around Newbury informs ‘198 Methods of NDVA’. The non-violent direct action in the story involves sitting high up in the trees and fending off increasingly-violent bailiffs sent up in cherry-pickers. The protagonist summons up all her strength and that of her female ancestors:
I scream strongly, loudly, apocalyptically. I scream and my scream is the scream of banshees, dryads, sirens. I scream because I’m scared of being felled or falling and I ache. I scream for Stella. I scream for Amrita Devi and her severed head. I scream for the sawn off branches at the bottom of the tree. I scream for the green miles being buried alive.
Within this screaming the reader might intuit all the pain and courage of the other women among the stories in this collection.
Perhaps the saddest of the stories is ‘Surge’, in which lonely 72-year-old Colin Fenwick joins in the clapping for NHS workers on Thursday evenings during lockdown but he does so inside his fourth-floor flat, the windows of which are sealed so nobody can hear him. The café where he usually has his Christmas dinner a few days before the big day is closed due to Covid so instead he buys a ready-meal Christmas dinner: ‘When he takes off the lid and surveys the contents, it looks like toy food: all the carrots peeled and trimmed to the same size, four uniform sprouts, six uniform potatoes, a perfect square of stuffing, two rubbery looking slices of turkey.’ Holmes ups the sadness quotient further, with her rare gift for delineating the unlucky hands which so many individuals are dealt.
The final story, ‘Below the Thunders of the Upper Deep’, is one which I’ve written about before, here, or rather about Holmes’s recording of herself reading it. It describes in detail the dreadful experience of living next door to an antisocial man – ‘the Kraken’ – who gets his comeuppance courtesy of three lively nuns, who, in my head at least, are the same ones who rampaged around the university campus in Andrew Davies’s superb 1980s BBC drama A Very Peculiar Practice.
It’s a suitably weird ending to a collection in which the everyday existences of people, mostly put-upon individuals, are enriched or offered a sense of hope through extraordinary, sometimes magical events. In her use of magical realism, an easy comparison could be made between Holmes and another brilliant Comma Press writer, Sara Maitland; yet Holmes’s imagination and narrative style are very much her own, as full of energy and life as her outstanding poetry. I hope that more stories, and maybe a novel or two, will spring from Holmes’s pen some time soon.
Gaia Holmes, He Used to Do Dangerous Things, Comma Press, 2024, available to buy here.
Review copy kindly provided by Comma Press.
Tag: short-stories
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Review of Gaia Holmes’s He Used to Do Dangerous Things
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Review of Sarah Maitland’s True North
Sara Maitland, True North, Selected Stories, Comma Press, 2024
£14.99, available to buy here.
Among post-war British writers, few can justifiably claim to have amassed an oeuvre as varied and interesting as that of Sara Maitland. Like her friend Angela Carter, Maitland made her name from the late 1970s as the writer of feminist novels and stories which incorporated Magical Realism, often reworked fairy tales, and generally pushed the boundaries of contemporary writing. Her debut novel, Daughters of Jerusalem (Blond and Briggs, 1978) won the Somerset Maugham Award and is considered, alongside Michèle Roberts’s A Piece of the Night, to be the UK’s first feminist novel, though it contained disconcerting elements of Magical Realism which both underlined and were tangential to the sharp, dialogue-driven narrative. Maitland and Roberts were part of a feminist writers’ collective with Michelene Wandor, Valerie Miner and Zoe Fairbairns. Since her debut, Maitland has had six novels and many short-story collections published, though much of that fictional output appeared before the Millennium.
The reason for Maitland’s much-reduced fiction in recent years is explained in a non-fiction work for which she is probably best-known, A Book of Silence (Granta, 2008). It covers Maitland’s spiritual quest for ever deeper silence, which sees her move from London to Northamptonshire, to moorland in County Durham before a period of isolation on Skye and other research – a double-session in a flotation tank; stays at the Sōtō Zen monastery of Throssel Hole and in the Sinai desert – and two years living with her mother in Galloway, before the eventual building of a house miles from nowhere, further into Galloway. What Maitland found as a result was that, while the silence engendered by the solitude and the eschewal of television, radio and other noise-making devices enabled for her a reduction of self as a way of getting closer to her God, it wasn’t necessarily the kind of silence needed to produce narrative writing.
It seems as though Maitland isn’t as well remembered for her fiction as she should be. I have a deep fondness for her novel Three Times Table (Chatto & Windus, 1990), which, with a delightfully unexpected dose of Magical Realism, interweaves the lives and adventures of three generations of free-spirited women living in the same North London household. Maitland has hybridised non-fiction and fiction successfully, notably in Gossip from the Forest (Granta, 2012) in which she takes walks in a dozen British forests and woods, considers the dark, sylvan origins of fairy tales, and re-tells a Brothers Grimm fairy story for each of the walks. But I also very much like her other short stories too, so it’s timely that the estimable Manchester-based, not-for-profit Comma Press, whose books always look and feel beautifully turned out, have published a ‘best of’, having previously published Maitland’s stories in six anthologies and in her project Moss Witch (2014), stories written in response to conversations with eminent scientists.
True North isn’t a conventional Selected, because each of the 16 stories was chosen by a relative or friend of Maitland, including Richard Coles, who also contributes a chatty and pleasant but superfluous introduction-cum-recommendation. (Maitland should surely be at least as much of a national treasure as Coles is, but that’s by the by.)
All of Maitland’s chief fictional concerns are represented, including two updates of fairy tales. ‘Hansel and Gretel’ relates a visit made by a now-married Hansel to Gretel who lives in the forest. They look back on the story which defined their early lives and which, although they are twins, binds them closer still. It’s in the almost incidental details that Maitland’s prose really shines, with a rhapsodic beauty:
Later, they go for a walk. She puts her arm round his waist and her head leans lightly on his shoulder. There is a little party of long-tailed tits, ridiculous and agitated, bustling along ahead of them; tiny pinkish balls of feathers with absurdly long tails. They do not talk much now. It is all hushed green gold and the wind has dropped away.
Time has also moved on within ‘Rapunzel Revisited’: Rapunzel is now an old woman, living in the famous tower, with a young witch as a maid.
As I say, Magical Realism galvanises much of Maitland’s output and here is no exception. The first story, the title-story from Moss Witch, is similar in tone to her versions of fairy tales, macabre, but with a seam of dry wit running through it. It’s her close observation of natural history, no doubt born of years of walking, and experiencing, isolated places – as well as her conversations with Dr Jennifer Rowntree, Associate Professor in Ecological Genetics – which makes the narrative so compelling. Mosses (and liverworts) are very much in vogue these days, but Maitland was evidently ahead of the game. ‘Seeing Double’ and the drolly-titled ‘Why I Became a Plumber’, the pretexts of which I won’t spoil (though the former is a little reminiscent of Bruce Robinson’s film How to Get Ahead in Advertising, and the latter springs elegantly from a trio of very clever epigraphs), both take the reader into the fantastical, but always in a believable manner; fantastic but not fantasy.
Natural history, species depletion, over-fishing, scientific research and a deep affection for the Hebrides all inform ‘Her Bonxie Boy’. In passing, Maitland’s lyrical writing sings of,
[. . . ] the A82, the most beautiful road in the world. She drove, as always, with that strange mixture of recognition, signposts and deep desire. Loch Lomondside. Crianlarich. Tyndrum. The long haunted pass through Glen Coe. Ballachulish. Fort William. Invergary.
She turns west. Her heart sings. The lovely lonely road through Kintail. Kyle of Lochalsh. The bridge, now free at last. Across An t-Eilean Sgitheanach, the winged island, with the Cuillin towering above the road, monstrous in their ferocity. Portree. Uig, where the road ends at the bottom of the steep curling hill. She is going beyond. Outwith the harbour wall there is nothing but sea and work and love and joy.
Obviously, the place-names do a good deal of Maitland’s work for her, but there is a delicious energy and freedom to her sentences here. This story, benefiting from the expertise of Robert Furness, Professor of Seabird and Fishing Interactions at the University of Glasgow, is perhaps the highlight of the selection, with something of the emotional flavour of the Powell and Pressburger film I Know Where I’m Going mixed with serious ecological concerns and a trademark surprise ending.
As well as ‘Seeing Double’ and ‘Hansel and Gretel’ there are three other stories about pairings. Identical twins David and neurodiverse Derek in ‘The Beautiful Equation’ are at odds in a strange, but, as ever, all too plausible tale. ‘A Fall from Grace’ features Eva and Louise, two acrobat sisters in Paris, who bear comparison with Sophie Fevvers, the aerialiste hero of Angela Carter’s justly celebrated 1984 novel Nights at the Circus; the tone, though, reminded me of the novels of Rose Macaulay, especially The Towers of Trebizond. The dark title-story is about two women living together, one young and one old, who are visited by ‘a new shape’ which turns out to be ‘an ice traveller’.
‘Claudia Procula Writes a Letter’ is a witty, catty epistle from the wife of Pontius Pilate:
We did entertain their sort of king fellow, a nasty little quisling called Herod, to dinner last night. The most vulgar, creepy undersized worm you can’t imagine [. . .]
Right at the moment, par exemple, there’s a whole lot of unease because of this young man from the northern half of the province who’s arrived in town. He’s rather good looking in a hairy sort of way, and can talk the hind legs off a donkey (oh, yes, I went and took a discreet peek, you know me).
Although many of them have themes of female freedom or strivings for it, the most explicitly feminist story is ‘An Edwardian Tableau’, in which a young woman, expecting a proposal from an older man, a canon with prospects of becoming a bishop, boldly and bravely bears witness at dinner to the Metropolitan Police violence, including sexual, against Suffragettes on Black Friday, in November 1910, thereby killing conversation dead and thoroughly embarrassing her parents.
‘Andromeda’ also has a feminist slant, in a recasting of Greek myth, with Perseus revealed to be a bit of a shit.
‘Miss Manning’s Angelic Moment’ is a lovely Pymesque tale with the now familiar Maitlandian twist.
Maitland varies the stories from first to third person, and sometimes they hasten a little towards their conclusions. But they are never less than entertaining, frequently informative – though without being clunkily so – and mix the light and the dark in a way entirely reflective of life as we lead it, often movingly so. Her prose style varies too, from straightforward to richly savourable, always with the best interests of her storytelling at heart. True North provides a fine introduction to Maitland’s stories and her fiction in general.
Review copy kindly provided by Comma Press.
Matthew Paul: Poetry & Stuff 