IS THIS THE WAY YOU SAID?
by Adam Thorpe
Jonathan Cape ₤14.99, 288 pages
In his 2005 novel, The Rules of Perspective, Adam Thorpe uses multiple time schemes and devices such as prolepsis, or flash-forward, to dramatise an argument about historical judgment and interpretation. Several of the pieces in Is This the Way You Said?, Thorpe’s second short story collection, employ the same techniques - though to different effect.
In the title story, for example, we are told in the first paragraph that Eddie Thwing, an editor at a fashionable imprint of a large publishing conglomerate, “lost his kid, Ed, in a tragic accident, the details of which no one was quite certain about except that it involved the sea”. The circumstances of the child’s death become clear only near the end - Eddie meets Jonathan, the middle-aged author of a manuscript that Eddie had taken away on holiday with him, and the story lurches towards a dreadful climax.
A third-person narrative voice slips the reader the information about the fate of Ed in that opening paragraph, though the disclosure occurs in a section told largely from Jonathan’s point of view - in the heat of his ambition, as he breathlessly takes the measure of Eddie’s apparently enthusiastic response to the 600 or so closely typed pages of his novel.
Thorpe moves stealthily between the two points of view, and between an interiorised free indirect style (”That was a bad time, when Marion had a miscarriage”) and a more straightforward omniscient narration (”Jonathan had started his novel on his forty-second birthday”), using the latter to tell the reader what will become of his characters. We know from the beginning what will happen to Eddie’s son on the beach in Greece - and this knowledge in turn coerces our expectations about the outcome of Jonathan’s lunch with the man he hopes will become his publisher.
This set-up is repeated in several of the other stories: “Abandon”, for example, starts with an elderly patient in a hospice, anticipating his own death, and then takes the standpoint of one his nurses, whose waking hours are beset by unruly images from her dreams, not to mention a serially groping boss. At the beginning of “The Orchard” we are told that the isolated house just bought by a couple with young children will, in 15 years, have had its solitariness compromised by a residential development. The characters in both these stories endure lives of truncated ambition and reluctant acquiescence, trapped in circumstances not of their choosing.
The tone falters in two stories, “Heavy Shopping” and “In the Author’s Footsteps”. In these, Thorpe is tempted by bathos and low comedy (in the latter case, about a fanatical hiker who takes his obsession with antique walking guides to ludicrous extremes). But these are isolated failures. More typical of his artistry is “Preserved”, a fine and rather delicate story about Jack, an ageing gay choreographer, who finds himself sharing a Tuscan holiday home with a much younger group of friends.
Jack falls in (unrequited) love with Mark, a charismatic botanist, whose childhood stories and oddly feminine poise give him an idea for the score he is trying to choreograph. But when he tries to notate the movements he has seen Mark making, he feels as if he is working out of a “labyrinth in which all exits were closing. I felt deathly actually”.
Jack is probably the most lucid witness in this collection to the bald fact of decrepitude and decay. After he makes an unsuccessful pass at Mark, he sees that all that is left to him is “the rest of my life, diminishing unto death”. Thorpe, you sense, is fascinated by the ability of human beings not so much to sublimate the recognition of their finiteness and smallness, as to endure it.
