Terminal Zones by Gareth E. Rees

Review by Phoebe T

Gareth E. Rees, founder of the website Unofficial Britain and author of Unofficial Britain, Car Park Life, The Stone Tide and Marshland, is in deep, dark love with landscape. A little like his narrator in ‘A Dream Life of Hackney Marshes’, who has a ‘romantic affair’ with an electricity pylon, Rees’s stories are tangled in the Anthropocene: B&Q carparks are place holders for human loneliness, motorway bridges for lost fathers, and pylons for lost lovers.

At its best, this collection opens us out into sublime connections: ‘[h]uman beings were not separate. Not really. The human body was a legion of microbial organisms.’ Elsewhere, the bleakness of the narrative voice can lead to what feels like callousness, taking aim at an ‘eccentric billionaire’ for his fatness, and an isolated woman for being a ‘trolley div’.

Rees’s narrative anger, though, is primarily directed at a deeply frightening future. In ‘Tyrannosaurs Bask in the Warmth of the Asteroid’, his narrator contemplates disaster: ‘[t]his is what it must be like after the ship hits the iceberg. That strangely serene period when it is afloat, as it should be, and yet fatally compromised, doomed to sink.’ That ‘strangely serene period’, it seems, is now, or a time just past, and Rees does not flinch from writing about the moment that we sink. In ‘The Slime Factory’, ‘whole tracts of London on either side of the Thames [have] slipped beneath the waves’ and yet its ‘denizens still cl[i]ng to the water’s edge, gazing out over their lost pasts.’ And yet, in pre-empting our ‘lost pasts’ Rees’s stories cling tightly to the present: with its bin days and its marshes and its pylons. We are, as Rees makes clear, irrevocably tangled in this world.

Terminal Zones is published by Influx Press, 13th October 2022