There’s a face I found myself making again and again when reading Peter Bradshaw’s short stories, and it was not pretty: top half screwed up in incredulity; lower half slack with bovine confusion. What, my expression said, just happened?
What indeed? Bradshaw is best known as the Guardian’s chief cinema critic, but this isn’t his first foray into fiction. The collection comes in the wake of three novels; but he’s admitted that ‘the short story form has always obsessed me’. That fascination with the form has given him the confidence to play with it, and us, and my confusion was deftly engineered from the start. In the opening story ‘The Kiss’, boy meets girl in a Hendon pub in 1951. Then what? Nothing really. It’s a compellingly gruesome nothing, but the rug feels sharply pulled from under your plodding expectation of exposition, climax and resolution.
It’s not that there’s no pay-off in these funny, improbable vignettes. There are indeed moments of realisation, or dénouement, but they’re truncated, subverted or blink-and-you-miss-it casual. Some stories are marginally more conventional than others. ‘Loyalty’ (the longest and last, set in a Piccadilly coffee shop), and ‘Career Move’ (in which Satan, who looks ‘like a Canadian academic’, makes a violent pact with a playwright) come closest to offering a beginning, middle and twisted end. But others are all twist, no story. ‘Srsly’ is genuinely one of the weirdest things I’ve ever read (and I’ve been in regular correspondence with the Belgian tax authorities since 2007). I don’t know how to explain it other than to say it starts with an east London content-streaming company employee making an obscene gesture at a work rival’s Twitter post and ends with childbirth in feudal Japan, all within six pages.
Bradshaw relishes the grotesque and improbable; his set-ups are outrageously inventive. Pope Benedict XVI writes a (very good) high-school comedy screenplay about twins; a gangland plot is mounted around a lost section of Wordsworth’s Prelude, featuring ‘drug-fuelled three-way conjugal congress’; an apparent auto-erotic asphyxiation in the tight confines of a mobile library becomes an unlikely whodunnit.
But the stories don’t tip so far into absurdity as to feel unconvincing. In a few economical paragraphs, characters are sympathetically drawn and their longings, insecurities, vanities and weaknesses feel all too credible. That’s what makes the rug-pulling moments so effective. Contemporary communication and its failings are also at the heart of many, grounding them in a recognisable reality. ‘Fat Finger’ features multi-faceted digital duplicity among pilates instructors. In ‘Appropriation’, the son-in-law of Benin’s minister of mines is sincerely on the digital lookout for an Englishman with whom to deposit a large sum of money. It’s our world, but a bit off somehow, compounding the confusion. That doesn’t make for a simply pleasurable read, but it does make for a face-pullingly interesting one.
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