In these six stories of human frailty and responsibility, Welsh writer Cynan Jones explores the imperatives of love and the labour of making and sustaining lives. Each is told with a compelling immediacy and intensity, and with the quality of returning to a memory.
In the story Reindeer a man is seeking a bear, which has been woken by hunger from hibernation and is now raiding livestock from the farms of a small isolated community. “There was no true sunshine. There was no gleam in the snow, but the lateness of the left daylight put a cold faint blue through the slopes.” The story’s world is one in which skill, endurance, even stubbornness might be insufficient to succeed, but are just enough to persist.
Jones’s austere world of rural settings is a working countryside of risk, hard labour and isolation. In an interview in the Los Angeles Review of Books Jones said: “Much rural fiction I’ve read by contemporary writers often feels quite fake, written from the point of view of a visitor, rather than a native.” His powers of noticing are native yet neutral, bringing precise, vivid life to his stories without dictating moral responses to the reader. Jones makes the reader see and feel the scene: the “happy shock” of the just-fed lamb in Cow, or in the same story: “The calf’s upward-facing eye opened. A dark globe endlessly deep in the pure white surround.”
In Cow, Jones takes a collision of emergencies on a farm, culminating in the labour of a cow, and makes of them an atmospheric, near-mythic drama. “With the clap of the car doors, a cloud of starlings lifted off the adjacent pasture. As they scarfed away, the ground, with all the wet going through it, seemed to flitter with the sound of their wings.” He inhabits the fleetingness of our human moment in the larger scale of nature and time, while illuminating and latently asserting the essential value of our struggles with the physical world, each other and ourselves.
In White Squares a man has received a court order judging that he should have no contact with his son. “He was angry actually at the court – the physical object of it itself, as a person can be angry with a low doorframe they walk their own head into.” His wife had testified: “He never does anything, he never gets anything done.” He decides he is going to fix it so that his son will win the annual river duck race, having been humiliated the previous year. “Some people always win things. Other people never win anything.” “You can’t rely on luck,” the father observes, and the story shows that you can’t necessarily rely on action either.
These stories are spaced out in very short paragraphs, many of only one sentence, and these often of just a few words. It is a device that in less skilful hands might produce a false reaching after of poetic effect; here it brings a physical rhythm that generates a maximum of force, presence and meaning. Drama arises from the freshness of witness and the flawless placing of action in the narrative.
The home in the title story is besieged by high winds and heavy rain: the storm of fate that might batter any family. The residents are unprepared for the once-in-20-years assault by tempest that now comes every year. The husband bought sealant but failed to apply it to the cabin boards in time, so that water leaks into the house. He was complacent about the pines growing close to the power lines, counting on the cypress trees to block them should they fall. His wife is more insistent about the dangers and he too knows, observing: “There’s just so much force now, in the weather.”
Pulse is a story about how connected living things are: trees, people, families, communities. A tree surgeon tells the couple that when one tree in a stand falls the rest are sure to follow, and the husband remembers his grandparents and how they died within weeks of each other. He thinks: “It’s the ground. We just have to hope that the ground holds.” The book as a whole makes a strong case for the centrality of the short story to the reading of fiction, and the reading of fiction as a place and a practice where sense and empathy can flourish.
• Pulse by Cynan Jones is published by Granta (£14.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
