Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction:
Next book on the shelf is another short story collection – this one called Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice
The narrator is a woman who directs commercials. She went to Oxford. She has a wealth of associations in her head – all of which she puts to use to sell, oh, Lysol. Whatever. She reminisces about a drawing she did as a young girl – of Jael and Sisera – for some reason, that story in the Bible really – not tormented her, but – gripped her. She couldn’t stop thinking about it. She talks about how she has used some of those images from her childhood in her adult work – The story has no plot, but it’s a rumination on different things -as the excerpt below will show.
I love the details of her writing, the sense-memory feel of it.
Excerpt from Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice
Anyway, Jael. Why do I remember Jael? Metaphrs. I do know – I have always known – that I felt a faint click of symmetry as I drove the point of my pencil into the paper. Pencil, peg. Another detached image, like the grenade. Pointed. Pointless. I do know also that whenever I remember that patch of fierce colour I remember, like an after-image, a kind of dreadful murky colour, a yellow-khaki-mustard-thick colour, that is the colour of the days of our boredom. For we were not unhappy girls, we were cared-for, nice, clever girls, and we were bored. It’s quite hard to think back to that time. All the buidings were the same colours, green and cream. We wore milk-chocolate-coloured gymslips over khaki-colored shirts, with what we then amiably called nigger-brown ties. I do not believe any of thought of the nasty meaning of those words, nigger-brown, we just recognised the colour. Ignorance, innocence, boredom. It’s strange how I hesitate, out of fear, to write down the true fact that we used that word, in that unloaded way. It’s so long ago, we shall be judged without being imagined. All the excitement of life was in books. Jane Eyre, with her burning bed-curtains, or being punished in the Red Room (I’ve made films with both those images, fire insurance and children’s furniture). Ivanhoe charging, Robin Hood in the dappled green light with his bow, Eliza escaping across the breaking ice, wolves and narwhals, volcanoes and tidal waves, excitement was all in books, none of it, nothing at all, seeped out into life. We were the pre-television age, and we cannot – that is, the absolute quality of our boredom cannot – be imagined by those who grew up with the magic lantern, the magic window on the world, the Pandora’s box peopling the world with temptations and emotions and knowledge and other places and people in the corner of the lounge/sitting room/front room. I know young people now have a worked-up nostalgia for an imaginary time when families communicated, people made things, played games, instead of passively watching. Now and then we did. I remember the physical pleasure of frenzied playground skipping. I remember the passionate life with which I invested a collection of lead ponies. But mostly – apart from books – I remember this smeared, fuggy, limited light of boredom, where you couldn’t see very much or very far, and the horizon was unimaginable.
