MARMOTS
by Clio Gray
A marmot in a jar. Who wouldn’t want one? I would, if only I could get my hands on such a thing. Instead, I have a box of bones I’ve picked up off the beach to scare the children with at Halloween, and the skeleton of a flat-fish which is oddly round and rather beautiful, with huge sub-orbital lobes which give it the appearance of having blind eye-balls on top its bony head.
I like such curios and curiosities, both in physical form and in language. I like that you can see a root word change from one language to the next; where such a mundane word as ‘enough’ is satisfyingly short as nog in Swedish, nok in Danish, genoeg in Dutch and genug in German. The same word, but with the sounds and letters all mingled up by their geographic spread, preserved within the ever changing museum of language which can transform a peach into the wonderful tongue-tripper of der Pfirsich in German, and the rather unpromising broskev of Czech.
Sadly, I am absolutely hopeless at learning languages, though I have trifled in my time with many, including Armenian, which has an entire alphabet all to itself. But if I cannot know these languages personally, I can explore them at least, and I often write about places and times which I have never, and could not possibly ever have direct experience of, except in my lovely labyrinth of books. They are my family and my friends. They keep me company, enlighten my days, keep me for hours on my knees in dusty second-hand book shops, sneezing over my new found treasures.
The pleasure I gain from flipping through pages written fifty, a hundred – maybe more – years ago, is hard to express. I can run my fingers along their spines and find I am unable to walk away from one that is no longer legible, feel compelled to pull it from its shelf and see what it is all about. It might be nothing. It might be a manual on how to make a thousand-year-old egg (see Hinklemann Hits the Cellar) or that there is such a place called the Putrid Sea (Across the Azov).
Many of my stories germinate from such seemingly inconsequential explorations. The chance (and rather obvious, on thinking about it) discovery that most whales and pinnipeds don’t have external ears, led, if indirectly and spiced up with the breaking news that Napoleon Bonaparte was clandestinely celebrated as a national saint in some parts of France following his exile, to the writing of Nil Sorski and the Walrus; and the somewhat sad list of the few words I stumbled across in a language named Archi, spoken only now by a few hundred people, and all in a single village in West Dagestan, led to the writing of The Insanity of Sheep. And yes, I too had to look Dagestan up: sort of in the middle bottom part of Russia above Armenia (cradle of Western Christianity), bordering on the Caspian Sea.
And who knew that executioners were not allowed to swim in the same slice of water other mortals threw themselves into on hot days (The Boot-Tree Man) or that there are four distinct wind types which blow across the Baikal (I should have listened harder…) or that there used to be a thriving trade in prosthetic noses (Of Phlegraean Fields)?
The plains of our world and its history are littered with such extraordinary snippets, and if I am ever stuck for a starting point to a story, I just riffle a way through my files and books until something strikes me, and lights up the dark.
Short stories are often too short to go as deep as many might want, and the short stories in the Two Ravens collection are shorter than many, mostly because they were tailored at some prior point for entering competitions (with some success) and having to adhere to a pre-stated maximum word count.
For some this might be a stumbling block. For me, it was a necessary discipline, forcing me to chop down my inherent wordiness into something tighter and more to the point. There are other writing forms which allow their authors to go on and on (perhaps too much so) about the subjects which interest them, and occasionally the short story is but one stone across a ford waiting to be crossed.
BP’s Boys started out as a contribution to the BCSA (the British Czechoslovakian Association, which seeks to highlight the past and ongoing connections between these countries,) became much more, led me into the longstanding history of the scouting movement and their unspoken, and for the most part unheralded, contribution to the partisan resistance in WWII, running a network of underground contacts right across Europe, saving the lives of many, and ending the lives of many of their members, from scout masters right down to the youngest cubs, a few recorded being executed at the piteously meagre age of seven.
Stepping on Seals began as a very short story, and went to the opposite extreme. It features the weird and wonderful island archipelago of Saaremaa (one of many variant spellings over the years) in the bay off the Estonian mainland. Its inland lighthouses, giant erratic boulders, and the deep, dark meteorite lake so enticed me that it became the main setting for my third Stroop novel, Envoy of the Black Pine (due to be published by Headline, August 2008), which has also subsumed a flood scene from another short story, not in this collection, and purloined a couple of that story’s characters, who developed from mere bit part players into major starring roles.
Short stories are forgiving things, and are forever being changed and edited without complaint.
I am lucky enough to be chair of an annual short story competition (www.hissac.co.uk) and the stories that do well are those that hook you from the first few lines and reel you in. Short stories are not supposed to make you lean back and yawn and wonder when, or if, something is going to happen. You should leave them having learned something, or experienced a brief emotion you were not expecting, and the best ones make you want to carry on reading more about the world in which they are set.
And those worlds are myriad. It is one of the main delights of writing, at least for me, to be allowed to delve into the deep pool of which ever language we have been given and allowed rein to explore its adaptability, exploit its ability to evolve, for the same words to be put into a different order and mean something else entirely, to have the tools to say the same thing in a hundred different ways. Types of Everlasting Rest is the title story of this collection, and the last story to be featured in it, and encapsulates much of what my writing ethos is all about. It is the story of a man who travels far beyond his bounds into other climes and other cultures, and finds himself unable and ill-equipped to confront what he believes it to be. What he thinks is one thing, turns out to be another, and ultimately he is caught by its inconsistencies and its inherent intransigence, and he finds he is no longer able to return to what was once his home. It tells us that in the end we are all islands, which go sometime this way and sometime that, moved so often by forces we cannot see, that the objects and people we attach so much importance will not necessarily treat us in the same way.
As my fellow author at Two Ravens, Angus Dunn, was kind enough to say on reading Types of Everlasting Rest: ‘Instead of slipping off into the academic and rather dreamy state of contemplation that I had expected, I found myself in a mysterious proto-European twilight world surrounded by a forest of marvellous stories… I dread to think what might have happened to an inexperienced reader wandering into such a disconcertingly rich and wonderful collection. Would they ever find their way out?’
A collection of stories is like my box of beach-bleached bones, and if I make a few children run out of the house screaming at Halloween, then I have achieved my purpose. I gave them what they wanted, though did not necessarily expect.
