Reverse Engineering II ed. Tom Conaghan
Reviewed by Cath Barton
Writers of fiction may not be best placed to cast light on the meaning of what they write because, as this anthology makes clear, it tends to remain mysterious to them. There may be resonances in their stories that they don’t appreciate themselves until readers suggest them. When Tom Conaghan, instigator and editor of the Reverse Engineering series, asks the American short story writer Tom Drury if the title of his story ‘Path Lights’ alludes to the lights on his path leading the narrator of the story somewhere he didn’t want to go, he says: ‘You know that didn’t occur to me until you just said it. That he didn’t want to go there, I mean.’
This second in a series dedicated to the craft of the short story brings together work by authors writing in widely varying styles, but the wide-ranging conversations they have with Conaghan show that pigeon-holing work into genre, or defining rules for the form, ignores the subtleties of the creative process. The beguiling ‘Ancient Ties of Karma’ by Ben Okri is ostensibly a piece of flash fiction, but for Okri it’s a form all of his own: a stoku, which he describes as an amalgam of short story and haiku, which, crucially, follows dream-logic. Furthermore, he deliberately breaks the rule about showing not telling: ‘To tell is, at best, to distil. Sometimes telling saves dozens of pages. Think of how many pages it would have taken Dickens to show us that it was the best of times and the worst of times.’
The conversations also illustrate the challenges of the short story form. Sussie Anan, who wrote ‘Maintenance’ as part of a Creative Writing MA dissertation, talks about finding a balance between language and storytelling. She indulges in the playfulness of language in original expressions such as ‘studded with computers small as cashews’, but is conscious of the danger of that preoccupation impeding the flow of the story: the subsequent requirement to prune out some poetic elements. Eley Williams, discussing her story ‘Bulk’, also talks about paring back: specifically that she did not want to include detail that would make readers too invested in any of her characters — ‘this story was meant to be about encounters rather than corollaries.’
Some issues bridge what at first appears a wide rift between different forms of storytelling. Anan highlights the value of interiority, those undercurrents moving a story forward, and so too does Tessa Hadley when discussing ‘Bad Dreams’, in which her characters’ thoughts are not shared with one another but make the reader feel intensely involved, spying on what is going on in a family and getting satisfaction from that. Hadley shares with J B Priestley a fascination with the nature of time and says about her portrayal of the child in her story, ‘I did feel, writing those sentences about the little girl aware of existing in her present, which won’t last forever, as if I came to some centre there’.
Wendy Erskine (‘To All Their Dues’) picks up on a prescient them to both readers and writers, recognising that some readers may be dissatisfied with an unresolved ending: ‘Being alive with ambiguity: that’s the highest praise. For me it is really really important that the story exists beyond the end of the piece, that the reader has a projected idea of what’s going to occur in future time.’
Reverse Engineering II is a remarkable anthology — a compelling conversation about the elusive nature of the creative process. Ultimately it is for each reader to make of each story what they will, drawn in by their own preoccupations or surprised by difference, but all will surely find sparks and shards of illumination in the reflections of the authors about their individual approaches to the art form we call the short story.
Reverse Engineering II is published by Scratch Books, 1st November 2022