Last Rituals, by Yrsa Sigurdardottir

A wealthy German history student living in Iceland is found dead, strangled, eyes gouged out and a strange symbol carved into his flesh.  The student, heavily into witchcraft, body modification, erotic auto-asphyxiation, has been wedged into cupboard at his university, and is found when his body lands (messily) on top of a rather arrogant academic.

Thus starts Last Rituals, the first of Yrsa Sigurdardottir’s 6-book-and-counting Thora Gudmundsdottir series.  Thora is a lawyer – not specialising in criminal law – and by a somewhat circuitous route ends up being offered a generous contract by the student’s family to investigate the death.  They are convinced that the man in police custody isn’t the killer.  They decline to disclose why they’re so sure, but offer more money that Thora can rationalise turning down.  She’s a single mum to two children (a monosyllabic teen and an exceptionally tidy six-year-old), her car’s broken down, and she’s struggling to make ends meet.  So she accepts the deal, despite her misgivings, and despite her instant dislike of the family’s interlocutor, Matthew.

Some of what follows is cliché: students drink, smoke dope and and are utterly bored by the petty concerns of adults; teenagers get up to what teenagers get up to when they think their parents won’t notice; academics play office politic; and two intelligent, good looking people who start off disliking each other overcome their cultural differences and, um, warm to each other.

But there’s a lot here that’s new (or at least new to me) – plenty of Icelandic and medieval history, plenty of discussion of witchcraft and torture, plenty of clash between German and Icelandic cultures.  Along the way there’s missing ancient texts, tongue splitting, jealousy, casual sex, enough smoking to make you start coughing reflexively, and the least convincing receptionist since Tattoo Fixers.

The story twists and turns, without perhaps ever reaching the heights it could, but there’s no doubt that this is a skillful storyteller at work.  Perhaps a touch of what might uncharitably be described as flatness comes from reading it in translation (although maybe I’m doing Bernard Scudder, the translator, a disservice there, given that understatement is key to the current fascination with Scandi Noir).  Perhaps it’s the knowledge that Yrsa is currently regarded exceptionally highly in crime writing circles, so there’s a feeling of “nearly, but not quite” when reading this early work.  Perhaps it’s just a change from the multi-corpsed, high-stakes-thriller nature of much modern crime writing, and it’s better to appreciate the change of pace rather than complain churlishly that the book isn’t what it’s not trying to be.
Overall I liked this book much more than this all wibbling might suggest; I’m certainly planning on reading a lot more of Yrsa’s work.

Escaped Alone

I’m walking down the street and there’s a door in the fence open and inside there are three women I’ve seen before.

Escaped Alone is a (very) short play by Caryl Churchill, featuring four older women spending an afternoon sitting in a back garden, soaking up the sun, and talking.  There’s a subtext about the extent we’re all to blame for our own misfortunes, but mostly, it seems to me, it’s about life and love and loss, about action and reaction, about possibilities and phobias and terrible rage.

The play is narrated, after a fashion, by Mrs Jarrett (Linda Bassett), whose lines open (see above) and close the play.  She also punctuates the ongoing conversations by delivering occasional Cassandra-like descriptions of surreal apocalyptic events.  These events are described in deadpan style, at once funny and troubling.  The laughter that tends to accompany the start (“the hunger began when the food was diverted to television”) peters out with descriptions of desperation and death.

There are some fabulous lines.  “I always wanted to go to Japan”, say depressed and agoraphobic Lena; “Get to Tesco first” replies retired doctor Sally (revealed during a ‘cut-away’ to be intensely, debilitatingly, cat-phobic).  Lena ponders during another revelatory moment that it’s better to be in a empty room, because there’s “fewer things to mean nothing at all”.

It’s notable that although some of the discussion – perhaps most of it – revolves around the domestic, there’s no mention of the menopause; children and grandchildren are mentioned in passing rather than being the focus of discussion.  These women are people first and foremost, not conforming to some tired stereotype of what middle-aged or elderly women should be or should care about.

My theatre companion was unimpressed: he found it clunky and stilted.  I suspect this is a result of the direction – the dialogue doesn’t flow naturally, the women rarely interrupt each other, instead each halts or pauses before the next one speaks.  In some cases, this ought to be a tailing off as the speaker fails to complete a sentence or thought, but somehow it doesn’t quite sound that way.  For me, it worked – more or less – as a stylistic choice, but I can understand why it absolutely wouldn’t work for some people.  To be honest, I’m surprised this hasn’t cropped up in any of the reviews I’ve read, because it really is very noticeable.

As an aside (and obviously in no way specifically aimed at the woman five seats down the row from me) – if you’re going to turn up to a performance barely a minute before curtain up, and then laugh hysterically and loudly during the mildly funny and the overtly serious bits, then you shouldn’t be in a theatre at all; but if you really really must, it helps if you don’t tweet about being drunk twenty minutes before you arrive.

Flash Fiction

For sale: baby shoes, never worn

The most famous short story in the world, usually attributed to Ernest Hemingway.  It’s a perfect example of flash fiction, the ultra-short fiction that’s popular in both original and fan fiction.

I quite like dabbling in flash fiction.  It’s a good discipline, trying to convey a story’s worth of meaning in just a few words.  Writers are often told to “show, don’t tell”, or “lose the adjectives”, but this is another order of paring down to just the essentials.  This is about considering every single word – even the “and”s, the “or”s, the “the”s.  It’s often easier to write in the first person, not least because you can drop pronouns left, right and centre without necessarily losing meaning.

It’s easy to get wrong, though, as my overstuffed drafts folder will attest.  The key, I think, is in judging just how much of the heavy lifting the reader is prepare to do, and how much help the writer has to give them. As an aside, it think this is why flash fiction is popular in fan fiction circles; the characters are a given, the setting is (usually) a given, and possibly the common tropes or fanon (the commonly accepted fandom tropes/conventions) are a given.  Under those circumstances, almost all the work has been done, the writer just needs to provide a story.  No wonder fandoms love flash fiction.  Drabbles are a very common form – stories of exactly 100 words.  Some fandoms get creative; the Sherlock fandom created the 221B in honour of their protagonist’s address – a story of exactly 211 words, the final word beginning with B.

Without the framing of an existing canon to rely on, writers of original flash fiction have to use all the tools at their disposal to put the reader in the right mindset to fill in all the unwritten words.  Consider the baby shoes example.  It’s a story of loss.  It’s grief, it’s love, it’s broken promises and unnatural endings.  It’s burying your child.  It’s anger, it’s pain, it’s heartbreak.  It’s awful practicality – or perhaps grinding poverty.  It might even be murder.  But let’s face it, “giant baby”, or “wrong colour shoes”, or even “shoes on a baby?  Who does that?” are all equally valid interpretations; I doubt they’re common ones though.  Something about the brevity encourages us to seek out a deeper meaning.  The story’s only six words long, it must mean something, right?
For those interested in such things, CrimeFest’s FlashBang competition, for original crime stories of 150 words or less is open for another couple of days.