By deciding to create an entire short collection around the many ways in which children are deceived, placated, fobbed-off, used to fulfil unrealised dreams and suppressed by the many social media forums on which they can be derided by their piers, Marc Nash has set himself an interesting challenge and one which he sustains convincingly through most of these stories. His ambition is admirable and made more interesting and riskier by the variety of approaches he uses. He uses first-person narratives to voice the feelings and concerns of mothers, fathers, young girls and young boys. He also uses third-person narration to give a more objective examination of the character's negative impact on those they imagine to be aiding.
In 'Collateral Thinking', for example, a boy has constructed, with great imagination and ingenuity, several tableaux, “He created circuses from bathroom detritus, trapezes and high wires from dental floss, cotton buds to steady the balance of the intrepid funambulist. He fashioned pirate ships, gladiatorial amphitheatres, hospitals and zoos.” When his father imagines himself to be indulging his son and being a sport by joining him in a football game his son soon decides that he is too much of a “literalist”, too concerned with what is rather than with what could be and certainly far too upset when he finds some of the things his son has found in the bathroom bin and repurposed for his games. The solution – generous in the minds of his parents – curtails all the essential imaginative input which gave the games their essential appeal.
A story called 'Mummer' gives us the voice of a mother who has been with her daughter as she has been asked to explain, using anatomically correct dolls, the things the woman's husband – the girls own father – did to her. Pain, confusion and exasperation are convincingly conveyed. Here though, as in many of the other stories, the urge to use puns should have been resisted.
Those puns are a feature of Nash's writing, especially in the titles he uses for stories: 'Shelf-Help', 'Art Ache', 'Hero Sum Total' etc. Another very noticeable trait is the use of extravagant language or 'big words'. Why not, it might be fair to say, after all the words are there to be used. But they can be overused and lead to a sense that these words distract the reader by drawing too much attention to themselves and away from the essence of the particular story in which they appear. The effect is also to diminish any feeling of closeness to the material of a story and create an unnecessary sense of distance. In 'A Briefing on Time's History', he writes: “ That the transformative thaumaturgy of the book had not worked in its entirety. Such capricious and incongruent patterning only made him more want to penetrate the occult lore unleashed by the various nocturnal grimoires, with their simple line drawings and no more than two rows of typeset incantatory magic per page.” A four-page story called 'Teratological' includes the words “cognomen”, “engrams”, “pneumas”, “fugacious”, “panopticised”, "minotaurhetorical" and “oubliette”.
We as readers want some “incantatory magic” too and there are stories where details and language come together to provide it. 'Lesions of the Damned' is an excellent story in which a boy's disdain for his grandmother's pleasure in putting the pieces of a jigsaw together leads to the discovery of his own preternatural ability to complete such puzzles and, in time, a way of displaying his mental confusion. In 'Dream Catchers' Nash attempts to replicate the sort of text message exchange that might take place between boy-band obsessed girls in the hours before they attend a concert by their favourite group. It appears horribly convincing. Equally convincing is the increasing despair of a mother in the story 'Shelf-Help' as she addresses her son, Jonah, about his lack of speech. A word is all she wants from him but her frustration builds as she cannot, herself, find the particular words that will make this happen.
Other topics dealt with in these stories include a fathers vicarious wish-fulfilment as he watches his son's progress as a football player in a manner he never achieved. But whose dream is being lived on the field? We also get a long consideration of nose-picking, the thoughts of a man who reads stories for children in a library, eating disorders and the excellent ventriloquising of a very young child as she reacts to the inducements of her parents to get her to eat. A series of increasingly desperate measures lead to consequences that will long outlast childhood.
Any parent who reads 'Stories We Tell Our Children' will, most likely and wearily, arrive at a conclusion they have already reached. That no matter how they try they are always getting things wrong, as they in turn were wronged. Philip Larkin knew it and we all know it. Marc Nash gives the errors a sophisticated twist in a series of engaging and carefully created stories that deserve to be read by anybody who was once a child.
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