"Contracts" by P J Walters

Publisher: Waggledance Press; 1 edition (30 Oct. 2016)

ISBN-13: 978-0956966827

The blurb to this book tells the reader that everything in this story is fake, even the name of the main character – it talks about being on the run, being washed up, doing one last job. Blurbs are there to get you to pick up the book, to think, yeah, that sounds like a decent thriller; to make you put your hand in your pocket and dig out the cash. The cover is dark. Bleak. You think you know what you’re getting. You think this is going to be straightforward genre fiction.

But is it? Is this really just a standard crime thriller, read it once, forget it? I don’t think so. I think it’s far, far subtler than the blurb would lead you to believe. True, it’s full of ‘stuff’ happening. Scene after scene winds up the tension ready for the explosive and shocking finale which incidentally, is foreshadowed brilliantly halfway through novel. It’s not so much what happens at that point, but what John, the narrator, says in one of his occasional soliloquies that punctuate the action where he talks about the lack of imagination he sees in the ‘easy-going criminals’ who make up his circle. The emptiness of their thought processes means they cannot see how their actions are going to have real, devastating and horrifying consequences that are beyond their wildest imaginings – the point being that they are incapable of having those imaginings in the first place. There are disasters, tragedies, waiting to happen, and they’ll never see them coming until it’s too late. They simply don’t think. 

John, on the other hand is a thinker. He tries to switch his thinking off, along with his emotions, but that high-functioning brain of his is there in the background all the time, even when he’s numbing it with drink or the excessive workouts with which he abuses his body in his search for oblivion. His life is a downward spiral. He can see this. He has imagination. But even he can’t see the ending.

PJ Walters has produced a hilariously self-deprecating biography for the purposes of this publication. In it, he says: PJ Walters is an academic and writer with the most lacklustre CV in modern British history. He once won an Arts Council award for his writing, but it’s now worn off. The best thing that can be said about him is that he owns a nice hat. Yes, the hat is very nice. I’ve seen photos. But Walters is far more than an academic with a hat. Much of ‘Contracts’ is filmic, much of it very noir, and it’s clear that this is an area which Walters understands intimately. Each scene is perfectly choreographed – it’s ready to be filmed. This is the book of the film that is yet to be made. Walters directs it with exemplary skill, but he bypasses the need for the expense of production – he projects the story directly into his readers’ brains. The language he uses is an object lesson in invisible excellence. You stop noticing you’re reading at all. That’s how it should be.  

It’s not all darkness. There is some humour, though it’s pretty bleak. I particularly enjoyed the excruciating journey John takes when Euan is driving for a change, and he has his CD on auto-play, continually repeating a mind-numbing thumping beat at unbearably high volume. We’ve all had vehicles like that drive past us – it makes a change to be inside one, but this is precisely what this book does so well. Walters takes us inside every aspect of the underworld that his anti-hero inhabits.

The novel is called ‘Contracts’, and it’s a great title, multi-layered, many possible interpretations, but it’s left to the reader to decide precisely what they think it means, beyond the obvious.

So it’s a thriller, yes, and a very good one at that. But it also crosses over into literary fiction because it never spoonfeeds the reader, it never explains. This is not airport fiction. This is a thought provoking and disturbing novel that will get under the reader’s skin in a way which many throwaway thrillers can only dream about, if they have the imagination. But that’s just the point. They don’t.

Review of Mandy Pannett's 'All the Invisibles'

SPM Publications  

ISBN: 978-0956810120

‘Best After Frost’ was chosen by the Inter Board Poetry Community as their poem of the year 2011, and quite right too. Medlars – who remembers medlars? More to the point, who will be able to forget this ‘smutty fruit’ after reading a garnet-red and delicious slurpy-slimy poem that sets the tone for an extraordinarily vivid collection. I would have been happy with a whole book of Pannett’s nature poetry, could have sat back in a comfy chair and read through one brilliant imagist poem after another, but it was not to be. By the second poem, I was having to start googling references. This was not a chore – this was a Good Thing. I will explain.  

Pannett breaks us in gently with the word. ‘psychopomp’. Great word, but I didn’t know what it meant so looked it up. The definition made perfect sense. Pannett could have used an easier word in her poem title, but why should she? Why dumb down? The chosen word is always precisely the right word, never the one that is better known but might not do the job so well. In ‘Psychopomp: a Guide’, Pannett explores the fine line that is the meeting place between the contemporary and the mythological. This theme runs through the entire collection. Ancient and modern – are we really so different from our ancestors? ‘Two For One’ is an age old tale of vengeance told in a contemporary setting, so any doubts that we’re somehow different is quickly dispelled. The ancients will have their say later in the collection, and they go far, far further back than I expected – but more on that later.

Pannett expects her readers to have a reasonable familiarity with concepts from the ancient times through the dark ages to the Renaissance and beyond. Unfortunately not all of us have her level of erudition, but we no longer need volumes of Encyclopedia Britannica weighing down our teak veneer wall units – we have Wikipedia – and even if we didn’t, the poems stand by themselves without the necessity to know all the references. Knowledge adds an angle, a colour – but it’s not essential. We can read about the traveller from the ship of fools as he explores dry land, and sense the irony because Pannett has made it clear and has no interest in veiling her message. You’d be hard pressed not to understand the poem even if you didn’t know the historical uses of the image. I became so used to looking stuff up that when I came to poems where I was sure I was missing references, I actually emailed the author for clues. As often as not, it turned out that the poem in question was exactly what it said it was and I didn’t need a Masters in Classics or anything else. Sometimes a hare in a field is just a hare in a field. One forgets.

One of the most intriguing offbeat facts I learned from this collection was that Catherine of Aragon brought sweet potatoes to England as part of her dowry. Pannett was not making this one up. I checked. And Henry VIII really did set a competition for growers in England, none of whom managed to cultivate the plant successfully. Out of this random historical fact, Pannett has built a powerful and unusual poem. In ‘Trust the Sun’, Odysseus makes his first appearance. He’ll be back – unless I’m misreading one of the poems, which is always possible. They are so rich in ideas, it’s easy to go off at a tangent and see tales that aren’t really there, but that’s an undeniable strength as it brings out the story-teller in the reader.

You think you know certain images, but you don’t, not really; not until you’ve viewed them through Pannett’s eyes. What if a horse in the Bayeux tapestry could speak? What indeed. The poor beast would suffer ‘bowels of blancmange’ before experiencing the terrible transitions of its brief history, assaulted by ‘arrows like blowflies’. And what is really going on in Millais’ painting of Isabella (she who loved a severed head) that arrived via Boccaccio and Keats and ended up dissected by Mandy Pannett’s pen? Everything is in precise Pre-Raphaelite sharp focus in the painting, and also in the poem, but here it’s at an oblique angle. There’s probably a doctoral thesis to be written exploring the difference in precision between words and pictures with specific reference to Isabella.  

In Durham Botanical Gardens there’s a block of marble engraved with Basil Bunting’s famous lines from Briggflatts: ‘Pens are too light. Take a chisel to write’. I thought of that line on reading ‘Mottoes on Sundials’, as well as the more obvious ‘Time is. Time was. Time is past’ which supposedly originates in Greene’s Elizabethan play ‘Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay’ despite sounding much older. Be that as it may, Pannett has found inspiration in the mottoes engraved on sundials. This is a lovely idea. She has taken each inscription and turned it into a poem. Aulus and Lucius built their sundial in Pompeii, so there is great resonance in the lines about voids in the ash – but Pompeii is never mentioned. I find this theme of taking scenes from antiquity and showing them from a different angle refreshing and beguiling.

In ‘Stopping a Bunghole’, I can’t help but feel we have the complete thoughts of Shakespeare (but mostly Hamlet) in one short poem. And why not. This is certainly one possible reading. Pannett never lays down strictures; never insists on a specific meaning. She gives you the best words in the best order, but after that it’s up to you, as should be the case with all literature.

I’m an art nut, so for me, personally, it’s the art poetry that does it; that makes me want to read and re-read. If you want to know how to seduce this particular reader, write about Dürer. I know the artist, now show me the man. This is precisely what Pannett does. Just as I’ve settled into the Renaissance, however, ‘A New Cartography’ comes along and I’m yanked back into the present; a present so removed from the past that this reads as sci-fi at first, but no – it’s contemporary. This is real. This is happening now. I’m back in the present and seconds later I’m addressing a ‘True Fly’ which unexpectedly takes me into DH Lawrence territory and made me think of his mosquito poem. Then, without warning, we jump back to ancient times with ‘Group of Eight’. Coincidentally, when I first read this poem I’d just been looking at Neanderthal cave paintings of seals looking weirdly like double helix DNA. There is something about cave art that ties us together across the millennia in a way words cannot. Language grows and changes. The owners of those eight hands wouldn’t speak any language we know, but we know what a bison looks like and we understand the concept of deer flying across the sky – we’ve never lost that sense of wonder, of the numinous in nature.

‘The Hurt of Man’ needs to be read with Sibelius playing in the background to get into the right mood. This one sent me scurrying off to find out who ploughed the field of vipers and to generally renew my woefully slight acquaintance with the ‘Kalevala’. I like poetry that says, ‘Look, here’s something that happened that you may have read about – go and read more’. I did, and I’m glad I did.

The poetry of the potential typo is represented in the lovely misreading poem, ‘The Starling Point’ where the dull little church of St Olave Hart Street is transformed by the idea of ‘a word / misread that ushers in rune-stones’, but just as the reader settles into this comfortable place, Pannett throws ‘Stunted’ into the mix, a searing poem of what happens when a child has to find some way to survive a cruel upbringing – one of the most powerful and unsettling images of the entire collection.

‘Later, All At Once’ is a wondrous bunch of snippets. No, snippets is too mean a word. A time-traveller’s compendium of moments? Yes, that’s closer. A veritable gallimaufry of images, all of them precise, every one crystal clear. Another clear image sings through in ‘Every Last Bell’. I’ve drawn that bridge with its ‘glittering vertebrae’. This falcon’s eye view of the City zooms in on what might not be immediately obvious, but is no doubt somebody’s prey. When reading this one I couldn’t help thinking of Macbeth and the bell that summons Duncan to heaven or hell. On the subject of sounds – I want to hear the reconstructed fossil’s chirp. Read the collection, and you will too, I promise.

Driftwood has so much more resonance than dust or clay. In ‘Woman-Tree’ I had to assume Pannett was channelling her Norse forebears, and if she hasn’t got any, that’s quite bizarre. Of course she’s got some. Must have. Without getting all Jungian about it, there’s a strong impression of collective memory at work here. Her ancestors could read this newly written poem and understand every word, every reference and every thought. Stories – we all have stories. We understand such things. William Shakespeare wrote many of them down for us, which is handy. ‘Titania’s Wood’ takes me straight to the 1935 Fritz Reinhardt version of ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, one of my absolute favourite Shakespeare adaptations for the dangerous other-worldness with which he imbues the visuals. I’m convinced that while the cameras were pointing one way, this poem was happening somewhere else, very nearby.

There are so many more wonderful images in this collection. I wanted to list them all, but knew that would be impossible. Read the book instead, as that’s where you’ll find faces of foxes, whimsical looks at the heart, achingly sad poems, and others that make you remember how extraordinarily potent cheap music can be (thank you Noel Coward). Then clutch your birthstone and hope for salvation.

Or visit Room 44 at the National Gallery. I’m talking ‘Seurat, It’s a Long Sunday’ here. The Sunday picture is of course ‘A Sunday on La Grande Jatte’. The picture on ‘the other side’ has to be ‘Bathers at Asnières’ from the description. The poem tells the reader to go north – the empty beach, I would guess, is ‘The Channel of Gravelines, Grand Fort-Philippe’ and your boat can be tied up on the river bank (The Seine at Asnières). I tend to go even further north. I love Akseli Gallen-Kallela’s ‘Lake Keitele’, and if it’s not mentioned in so many words in the poem, it’s only because we’re concentrating on Seurat’s work. It’s still there. You can’t miss it. Go and have a look. Does the reader need to be familiar with this particular room in the gallery? I know these paintings so well, I find it impossible to do a ‘new’ reading of the poem, so I really have no idea.

After Seurat, we have Monet – his life in reverse through ‘A Suggestion of Leaves’, a beautifully conceived and executed poem, but before getting too comfortable with the French Impressionists, we’re yanked back in time again. Mesolithic morphs into Neolithic, but hindsight is unavailable to this stone age man. Is this progress? He can’t tell.

Why didn’t I know the paintings of Eric Ravilious? I do now. I read the poem, looked up the artist. Ah – a student of Paul Nash. I love Nash’s work. I’m taking so long looking at the paintings, I’ve forgotten about the poem. Go back to look at it. This is an artist I should explore further, but before I do that there are a few gentle poems and then suddenly we’re back to pre-history and crossing the land bridge that brought people from Siberia to America. ‘The Kelp Days’ is a stunning poem. Vivid and real and immediate. I’m not surprised to find it won first prize in the Wirral Festival of Firsts 2011.

Remember Odysseus? His father was Old Laertes. Did Odysseus dream of the artichokes and olive groves back on old Ithaca when he was far, far away? I certainly think Pannett dreams of the South Downs. That distinctive countryside pervades much of the collection, particularly the title poem, ‘All the Invisibles’. At this point the reader is nearly at the end of the book. Just a few more intriguing facts to learn ‘Ignatius of Antioch Looks for Stars’. He does? Okay, I’ll look him up, and also try to find the Peckham Rye reference and – good grief. In 1767, William Blake visited Peckham and had a vision of an angel in a tree. I didn’t know that. Oh yes – the poem. What was that about? I return... I’ve a feeling the music of the spheres is going to link this poem to the last: ‘Aeolian Rain’. Yes it does. Angels; this is all about angels – maybe. And everything else.

I’ve resisted talking about aspects of the poems that put one in mind of the collective unconscious or archaic remnants mostly because I don’t know enough about such concepts to say anything sensible, but if I did know about them, I’d be able to analyse this collection and explain its universality in a very technical way. As I don’t, I’m relieved to be able to suggest you read the book instead. I can guarantee that these poems are far more enlightening than any essay I might be able to write. Ideally, take the collection to an art gallery and read it there. You might suffer sensory overload, but it will be worth it.

Two new reviews for 'Small Poisons'

Here are two fabulous reviews of 'Small Poisons' from a couple of writers for whom I have the deepest respect: novelist Rosalie Warren and poet John Irvine.

*****

Review by novelist Rosalie Warren

Joe is a long-stay patient in a psychiatric ward – unvisited, it appears, by family or friends. 'Small Poisons' is primarily, for me, the story of his illness and recovery, though it is many other things too, and this is as far from a conventional novel as a meadow of wild flowers is from a formal garden.

After a brief introduction to Joe’s hospital ward, where he is reading Kafka in the early hours, we are led into his world – his home, his garden, his family. The veil dividing reality from dream and delusion is semi-transparent and flimsy, constantly shifted by the breeze. We do not know whether Joe’s family are really as he sees them (for his sake and theirs, we may hope not). Some of Joe’s visions are beyond belief – talking beetles, sentient sausages and philosophising caterpillars (there is plenty of humour here, too).

Yet as we follow Catherine Edmunds down her garden path, the impossibilities soon cease to matter and we become entranced, like children listening to a fairy tale. (On first reading Small Poisons I was reminded of long-ago sensations as I read, at the age of seven, Lewis Carroll’s 'Alice in Wonderland' and 'Through the Looking Glass' – that never-to-be forgotten combination of shock, suspense, fright, intrigue and finally mild addiction to this illogical but strangely familiar world.)

We meet Cicindela the beetle and her alarming friend, the fairy demon, who seduces and exploits her with his charm. Is he altogether evil? We are never sure. We experience the garden from the point of view of its inhabitants – plants, insects, spiders, the family cat… and we are gently reminded that there are vast ‘alternative’ realities, close to home, from which as humans we are almost wholly excluded. It’s a humbling message, reminding us in a refreshingly subtle and understated way of our responsibility to the natural world. At the same time, we laugh at green-minded Joe insisting that his son dig sandcastles with a useless wooden spade (plastic is bad) and filling his tank with cooking oil that gives off fumes like frying chips.

The human characters are, to put it mildly, disturbing. I’m reminded of one of my favourite authors, Hilary Mantel, as Edmunds provides an unflinching examination of the nastier bits of the human psyche (and also of Mantel’s treacly inseparable mixtures of real and imagined worlds). Joe’s wife Phoebe and the elder son Steven are particularly unpleasant (seen from Joe’s present mental state, at least). I will let you discover them for yourself. Ben, the younger boy, is a more sympathetic character and would evoke enormous compassion if this story were read ‘straight’. It’s difficult, however, not to see these folk as characters in a fairy tale – the wicked mother, the ‘ugly brother’, the neglected younger child who is fed and clothed but otherwise virtually ignored.

No-one appears at all concerned that Ben’s legs no longer work and that he has become confined to a wheelchair. His imaginary companion, Sally, is far from a typical, comforting childhood friend. She speaks in Ben’s (very precocious) voice, yet she is ‘other’ – a threat, capable of inspiring jealousy and fear. Ben misses his father but does not dare to ask where Joe went, after a night of violence and terror that Ben remembers all too well.

The fragile veil between real and imagined, truth and delusion, perception and hallucination, brings to mind Kazuo Ishiguro’s strange dream-like tale 'The Unconsoled' – another favourite of mine. I have already mentioned Hilary Mantel, and see 'Small Poisons' as continuing her tradition, especially in 'Fludd' and 'Beyond Black', of exploring the part of our minds that lurks below the surface, often coming into view only at times of distress, illness and, of course, in dreams. In a novel that also pushes against our tendency to see the human worldview as central, this is particularly powerful – we are led to question the whole nature of reality, interpretation and truth. And all in a superficially simple fairy tale – which is exactly how it should be.

Finally, of course, there are delightful connections here to 'A Midsummer Night’s Dream', with its mingling of human and fairy worlds, the ‘supernatural’ influences unsuspected by the ‘mortals’ – a whole additional reality out there of which they understand nothing. And any story whose heroine is a beetle must acknowledge Kafka, as indeed Joe does in the opening chapter.

Settle down with 'Small Poisons' and let Catherine Edmunds take you into a juicy, earthy and unforgettable world of beetles, fairy demons, ladybirds and dysfunctional families. Discover there that the mirror dividing this world from our own is only a minimally distorting one.

Highly recommended… captivating, funny, and completely, wonderfully new.


Rosalie Warren, 4/11/09


****


Review by John Irvine
Poet/writer/editor

Let me state right away that fantasy is not my preferred genre. Having attempted such fantasy gurus in the past as Anne McCaffrey (oh, you have to read this) without any success what-so-ever, I was not sure that I was the right person to be reviewing this novel, Small Poisons, by Cathy Edmunds. I mentioned my aversion to Cathy who immediately put me right: "this is NOT fantasy, John, there are no wizards or dragons. It is Magical Realism." So, having been suitably educated, I plunged into the peace and splendour of an average suburban garden.

I should have known better, of course, having read a lot of Cathy’s mind-bending, off-the-wall poetry. This ‘average’ garden is anything but average. Think on this: first you toss talking beetles, worms and flowers and a rhymester flower fairy/demon into a pot. OK? Then you add a dash of loony dad, a pinch of self-proclaimed goddess mum (into whose knickers the demon fairy bloke is dead keen to get) with her green beetle acolyte, a grossly fat obsequious son who gets booted about (literally) by his mum all the time, and his crippled younger brother (who has a girl called Sally in his head): well, with those ingredients, you can’t help but get a rich and spicy feed. Oh and there’s also Bobby the cat who spends the entire book murdering a family of sparrows.

The book is certainly that. Rich and spicy. Pungent.

Once immersed in the daily deliberations and mental manipulations of the above menagerie, I had difficulty putting the book down. The plot is not obviously complicated, and can be read seriously as a metaphor for our own daily grind, but it is very, very devious indeed. There is love, tragedy, lust, hope, despair, greed, manipulation, stupidity, remorse, arrogance, death, gluttony, avarice, jealousy, hate, forgiveness and quite a bit of violence in this belly-busting casserole. Have I left anything out?

Everyone in the story wants a piece of the action, and loyalties fluctuate. This one wants that one but can’t have, because that one already is trying for the other one who isn’t interested. Everyone cares about what’s happening to the others except that no-one cares a rotten fig about the cripple. Nice touch that, I thought.

The whole thing is an absolutely wonderful cross-species romp, with some of the most bizarre yet believable characters in any book I’ve ever read. In fact, I’ve never read anything quite like it, ever, and this is because Cathy Edmunds doesn’t take herself seriously (well, not all the time). She’s too smart for that.

This intricately-woven story is saturated with her peculiar brand of decidedly bent humour: very dry and whimsical. She tells a tale with humour that has sober undertones, a story to be read on at least two levels. And it’s challenging. That’s what won me over to her book. The humour, yes, and the challenge to let my mind rampage. There was hardly a moment when I wasn’t smiling or grinning or wincing, urging on this beetle or that fruitcake. It is difficult in the extreme, I can tell you, to be wicked, bent, serious, charming, clever and witty all at the same time. Cathy succeeds in spades. The fact that the woman is artistic, erudite and intelligent helps a lot, I guess.

It is an indication of the author’s thought processes that among this collection of incredible lunatics the only one sane and sensible character she offers us is a ladybird who dispenses non-stop wisdom and pragmatic advice to her friend the shiny green beetle. Ladybird is the thread binding all the other loonies together, albeit tenuously.

After feeding the reader a diet of amazing descriptive images throughout the book, Cathy wraps the whole shebang up with a terrific ending, one I didn’t see coming. I couldn’t imagine along the willowy winding way how she would be able to draw all the many raggedy strings together and leave the reader wanting more. There are so many complex characters and manoeuvres and machinations to bring to a climax, so many sub-plots and sub-texts to coagulate. I was darned sorry when the book came to an end, and that doesn’t happen very often for me

What I really liked so much about the ending was how Cathy....

Hah! You go buy the book and find out for yourself. I thoroughly recommend this novel to anyone who is prepared to suspend conventional thinking for a couple of days, who enjoys the bizarre laced with whimsy, and who revels in amusing madness and mirthful mayhem. And let’s not forget that this talented lady was the cover artist also.

I promise you, you will never look at your garden the same way again...

This book gets my 2009 Mega-Supreme Spotted Dick Pudding with Steaming Compost Award with Bar and five Beetles.

PS: Make no mistake. In spite of my somewhat flippant review, this is a cleverly and skilfully written body of work, filled with rich, iridescent language and chock-a-block with carefully-drawn characters. The sub-plot(s) is rather serious, although one can still enjoy the book without delving between the lines and interpreting the metaphors. The entire storyline has been well thought out and developed ruthlessly to its satisfying conclusion. Of course, there has to be a sequel, right, Ms Edmunds? Cathy?

John Irvine
Colville
New Zealand

Small Poisons - a reader's view

The publisher liked it, the proof-reader liked it, the various people who read and advised on chunks as I was writing the novel liked it – but until someone goes out and buys the book with their own money and spontaneously tells you how much they liked it, you still have a few moments of doubt. So a huge THANK YOU! to author Jan Harris for saying, I've just finished reading Small Poisons and thoroughly enjoyed it. I expected skilful writing, imagination and a plot to make my eyeballs pop and was definitely not disappointed. You've created a magical world with some fantastic characters and lots of surprises, and it all hangs together beautifully. Awesome work - well done!