English Magic by Uschi Gatward
Review by Claire Carroll
The title of English Magic refers to the visual artist Jeremy Deller, one of several real-life characters who appear in Uschi Gatward’s debut collection of short stories, published by Galley Beggar Press. Gatward’s artistic concerns overlap with Deller’s; both examine the intersection of English folk traditions, nature, ritual, politics, and collective action. Gatward’s prose is arresting and vivid, her writing often cinematographic in its clarity: Beltane, about a couple who find themselves at the centre of a May Day celebration, offers a similar hyper-real unsettling aesthetic as Ari Aster’s 2019 folk horror film Midsommar. But it’s the collection’s compelling attention to the idea of the threshold—the veil that separates reality and fiction, or one world and another—that causes the stories to linger powerfully in the mind long after reading.
English Magic often returns to the idea of ritual, to experiences that Gatward describes as “numinous or transformative”. Alongside the seasonal folk traditions—both archaic and contemporary—that take place stories such as Beltane and Samhain, Gatward brings into focus the rituals of everyday life. Setting out a picnic, playing a board game, or rolling cigarettes are all described in luminous yet dispassionate detail. The language is spare and precise, littered with repeated motifs, the lighting of fires, candles, cigarettes, for example. This repetition gives way to an eerie sense that the characters are treading a marked path, destined to repeat the same rituals and patterns. In Lurve, Ollie, Lottie and Jeanie haunt the peripheries of London’s contemporary art scene. This is where Jeremy Deller appears, briefly. “I’m thinking of making a pond,” he says. “I need to think about it some more.” It is never quite clear what Deller is doing in the story, his symbolic inclusion at odds with his detached dialogue. But this is part of this book’s unique magic; a striking but oblique symbolism that nags at the memory long after each story is over.
Ollie reappears later in What Is For You Won’t Go by You; or at least, it might be him. The location is the same, but time has passed, Lottie and Jeanie now gone, replaced by Ria who is struggling with addiction. The pair circle the same art-world hangouts, making tea, running baths, rolling cigarettes, reading angel tarot cards. To the end, Ollie appears trapped in these rituals—"He is tired of it, really tired.”—desperate to escape but powerless to do so.
The dichotomy of confinement and escape is another recurrence in the collection. In The Bird, two newlyweds struggle to release a gull that has flown down their chimney, prizing away their living room fireplace to set it free. A visitation from a giant bird feels symbolic, but again, the symbol’s meaning hovers just out of reach. The characters ponder its meaning too:
“I thought it was out sacrifice to the gods. Our payment for having such a nice honeymoon. Letting it die.”
Like the tarot card for death, dead birds are said to signify new beginnings. What does it mean, then, to rescue a bird from near death at the start of your marriage? It’s questions like this that emerge, its answer unsettlingly obscure, that make for compelling reading.
Nature and landscape feature heavily in English Magic. Gatward often locates her stories in spaces where the wild intersects with the urban. In The Creche, the narrator and her child join a nursery group on a rainy-day trip from London to the seaside. The trip is quotidian (and intensely recognisable to anyone who has looked after toddlers) but it is loaded with emotion and sadness: a birthday cake with candles that can’t be lit, a sick child, the relentless rain. The narrator misses the return train and is left alone with her daughter next to the receding tide. In The Clinic another mother and child, this time at the edge of a dystopian future, are also trying to escape. The wilderness offers both a temporary haven, and a new set of potential threats to the woman and her family. In both stories, the land feels bigger, and at times, more alive, than the characters themselves.
The emphasis on nature is more than a nod to neo-paganism. It often feels urgently political. Lammas and My Brother Is Back deal with notions of home and community, and how the land features in collective political action. Both stories are based on real places, real events. Along with the use of familiar ‘real life’ characters in fictional pieces—Deller, and wandering iteration of Edward Snowdon— this device indicates a thin veil between fact and fiction, between our world and some parallel other.
In brilliant short story collections, there is a type of magic held in the liminal space between the stories, where a reader can lose themselves meditating on the ideas explored. With loose ends untied, readers have no option other than to work things out for ourselves. This arguably makes for a richer experience, one that expands beyond the time it takes to read and lingers in collective consciousness. English Magic is a vibrant example of such a collection, one that deftly addresses the unsettling and nebulous nature of this strange land, and its spiritual and political identities.
English Magic is published by Galley Beggar Press, 26th August 2021