tunnel of fish
I’ve been reading Kate Atkinson’s collection of short stories called ‘Not the End of the World’. And enjoying it a lot. I was compelled to read too much Guy de Maupassant as a teenager / university student and as a consequence I’ve avoided short stories ever since. Over-reaction or what?
Atkinson is particularly good at beginnings. Here’s the beginning of ‘Tunnel of Fish‘:
If Eddie could have chosen, he would have been a fish. A large fish without enemies, free to spend all day swimming lazily amongst the reeds and rushes in clear, blood-cold water. His mother, June, said not to worry, he was halfway there already, with his mouth hanging open all the time like a particularly dull-witted amphibian, not to mention the thick lenses of his spectacles that made his eyes bulge like a haddock’s.
Afterwards, of course, June had regretted saying that, but sometimes Eddie was so infuriatingly gormless that she couldn’t help herself. June had hoped that the removal of his adenoids when he was eight would make Eddie look more intelligent. It hadn’t. She had had the same expectations at nine for his spectacles. Most people she knew looked brainier with glasses, yet somehow Eddie contrived to look even more dopey. June thought that the grommets in his ears at ten would raise him from the undersea world of the deaf, and theoretically they had done, according to his ENT consultant, yet Eddie still behaved as if he couldn’t hear a word June said. Which was just as well, June thought, seeing as half the time the things she said to him were not very nice.
Despite the very down-to-earth style, the genre is definitely magic realism. What Gabriel Garcia Márquez might have come up with if he’d been born into the English middle classes, been educated at a good grammar school and gone on to get a first from a red-brick university. A big if, I suppose.
