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Twelve Stories
by Paul Magrs
Salt Publishing
2009, Paperback
First collection? No
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Paul Magrs is a prolific writer with credits
ranging from Doctor Who to the Times Literary Supplement. His latest
novel is Hell’s Belles
(Headline, 2009), part of the Brenda and Effie Gothic Mystery series.
Read
an interview
with Paul Magrs
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"You read and reread books,
and go back to them again, because you suspect that you’ve left
something behind. In them, inside them, caught up inside the
latticework of their pages."
Reviewed by Elizabeth Rutherford-Johnson
This is a lumpy, bumpy collection of stories that never lets you get
comfortable but propels you forward with its dark, edgy energy. The
opening story, Kept Safe and Sound,
is grand, even grandiose in scale, strong-arming together a series of
bizarre, uncomplimentary, downright bonkers themes: a lonely boy’s
addiction to horror stories, an uptight mother’s desperation to
preserve lost songs, a slowly disappearing robot dog. Ideas are
wrenched together and it worked – not in the sense of everything lining
up neatly next to each other, and isn’t the writer clever for making so
many different things mean the same thing: this was altogether more raw
and more magnificent. The mess of parts caught echoes off other
disparate pieces and threw them back, changed. The reader is almost
overwhelmed by unanswered questions and untold stories, and yet left
strangely satisfied. Something that was nearly lost has been saved and
a new story can now begin.
It was only after as I flicked
through the credits that I realised that this story was originally
published in an anthology of Doctor Who stories. The decaying robot
dog, the missing father eaten by a dinosaur – not to mention those
themes of loss and alienation – how could I be so stupid? And me a
Doctor Who fan who can (just) remember the original K9. The shame. Or
Magrs is just that good.
This love of big ideas is again apparent in Never the Bride
– a subtle and intellectual unfolding of whatever happened to the mate
that Dr Frankenstein cobbled together for his monster. According to
Magrs, she is running an immaculately kept B&B in Whitby, as far
away from B-movie schlock-house as you could wish. There are plenty of
sly references for aficionados of Mary Shelley – "The only books I have
are the Bible and Milton, of course" – that make the story a clever,
intelligent game and a joy to read. Apparently it’s also the opening to
a wider series of YA books – I wouldn’t have guessed it; it feels
complete in itself and with no hint of speaking down; Magrs waves the
gauntlet and its up to his readers to run and catch up, if they can.
Both
these stories typify Magrs’ habit of seeking out the gaps in other
people’s stories, the spaces that he can inhabit and make his own. It
doesn’t always work. Whereas Kept Safe and Sound felt complete and independent of the larger world it references, Sunseeker
never quite took off for me; it felt an entrance into a bigger world
that could not quite stand alone. However, mostly this is a rewarding
preoccupation for Magrs. The Foster Parents is
grand, gothic and extravagant, a mischevious and moving story woven
around the euphemism of finding babies in the cabbage patch. Magrs then
returns to his uncomprehending witness in The Girl from Victim Support,
expanding on a reference to a break-in. This is an understated tale of
loss, loneliness and fear that gives stature and dignity to previously
comic characters.
The Great Big Book Exchange
is the logical place to end this review. Insanely metatextual, this is
half a story about a boy who read stories, and half the writer’s
(apparently genuine) notes-to-self about writing that same story ("Oh,
God. As soon as you start PLOTTING it always turns melodramatic. You
shouldn’t even bother."). It’s a piece about the books that haunt and
drive us throughout our lives, the stories that will not let us go and
a writer fighting back and asking what it is he’s trying to do.
"I
think all I ever write about is losing stuff and finding it again. Or
never getting it back. Loss and time and love and books."
It’s
impossible to know how unadorned these "notes" are or are meant to be:
extreme artifice or naïf realism? But they convinced me – perhaps
because I have written so many similar interrogations and criticisms of
my own writing process. Placing them here next to the finished story
unbalanced it in an interesting way. The notes prevented the story from
closing, showed all the various other paths it might have taken. It
also managed to restore a lost library, the deeply personal set of
references that go into shaping a writer, and gave them it its own
brief spark of immortality within someone else’s story.
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