WRITTEN BY
ROBERT SHEARMAN
RECOMMENDED
PURCHASE
BIG FINISH
PAPERBACK
(ISBN
1-84435-460-3)
RELEASED IN APRIL 2010.
BLURB
By turns macabre and moving, horrific and
laugh-out-loud funny, Robert Shearman's short stories come from a place
just to the left of the corner of your eye.
Following his World Fantasy Award-winning
Tiny Deaths, this new collection puts a bizarre twist on the love
story. What is love, why does it hurt so much, and how is it we keep
coming back for more?
Sometimes poignant, sometimes cruel - but
always as startling and fresh as Shearman's fans have come to expect.
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NOVEMBER 2009
Okay, so it’s not
Doctor Who, but it’s Rob Shearman. Some might say that’s
even better. Whilst the Time Lord’s adventures are confined to all of time
and space as we know them and the boundaries of the family format,
Shearman’s stories are pent only by the limits of his extraordinarily dark
and delicious imagination; limits that I feel he hasn’t even come close to
pushing yet.
What I have here is the mass market paperback edition of Love Songs
for the Shy and Cynical. It lacks the exclusivity of the various lush
limited editions that saw release towards the back end of 2009, but at
least I don’t have to brave the author’s handwriting. It’s still a nice
thing to hold though; a shiny white and sparsely decorated cover suggests
elegance and chic, clashing delectably with the exaggerated and barbaric
array of human emotions that its contents probe.
Having thoroughly enjoyed Shearman’s first award-winning collection, the
primary focus of which was death, I was intrigued as to how the author
would broach the topic of love in this sophomore effort. Interestingly,
there isn’t all that much difference; if anything, Love Songs is
often more harrowing than Tiny Deaths as most of the characters
that the reader faces here suffer a fate far more abhorrent than
non-existence or even eternal damnation. Even the Devil himself isn’t
spared love’s tender mercies, as the terror-strewn tedium of his day job
kindles an urge to inflict his hackneyed romantic fiction on a world that
will never quite appreciate it in the way that he so desperately wants it
to.
Perhaps
even more palpably than it did in Tiny Deaths, here Shearman’s
unassuming and unconventional prose style sucks the reader straight into
the minutiae of ostensibly ordinary lives, before leaping off the page,
pulling their specs off, and then poking them hard in the eyes. Long
sentences and even longer paragraphs lend each of these stories a
colloquial feel, drawing in the reader with all the pull of a bedtime
tale, and then refusing to let them go; imprisoning them within a world of
slanted nightmares. Each story told serves as a window into a reality that
isn’t quite our own, be it a slightly-skewed world teeming with half bat /
half rabbits (“rabbats” or “babbits?”), a society equipped with technology
capable of classifying and quantifying one’s love, or a recession-busting
reality that offers the jobless the exciting employment opportunity that
is becoming a tree (maybe even an Oak, if you have the right aptitude).
And Shearman never gives into the temptation to lift the veil or show his
working. Many of the collection’s finest stories are those that are, in a
sense, incomplete. When Luxembourg vanishes, leaving a water-filled lacuna
in the middle of Europe, Shearman doesn’t waste words on the hows and
whys. Instead, he mocks the lack of media interest. He charts the journey
of a woman whose life is turned upside down as a result, and looks at her
love, her grief. Or lack thereof.
The stories that I’m not quite so fond of are those which threaten to
encroach upon the world as we know it; those that tell of cricket and
kidnap, about widowers on cruise ships being tormented by Filipinos named
Jesus and sucked-off by grannies. But for every such tale, there’s one
about a man fretting that he’s only receiving 14.2% of his wife’s total
love quota, who ultimately tires of his whinging and leaves him for a man
she loves far less but wants to fuck more. One about a man writhing in the
media spotlight following the brutal murder of his wife, never quite able
to reconcile himself to the truth that she’s “the interesting one” now,
and always will be. One about a dejected author nominated for some
literary prize, looking for recognition in all the wrong places. It’s
something of an irony that the one story in the anthology that purports
not to be about love is the probably the one that captures its power most
completely.
On balance though, I think that I prefer the one about death to the one
about love (which is a bit of a worry for me) but in truth there’s little
between them - tales of love and death flow in and out of each other as
effortlessly as a pair of Shearman’s most amorous protagonists. Ultimately
there’s a reason that Love Songs has been such a critical
success. As the title promises, it’s bashful and belittling, coy and
contemptuous, shy and cynical, and – above all else – unique. Pedantry
won’t permit me to preface that ‘unique’ with a ‘totally’ or ‘utterly’, but if I could, then here I most certainly would.
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