Yes Yes More More by Anna Wood
Review by Gary Kaill
The defining characteristic of the fiction of Anna Wood is a deep-rooted humanism. In Yes Yes More More, that priceless commodity more often than not arrives in the form of a lightly applied layer of compassion, and the stories here (typically charting the unremarkable, workaday events of blazingly real lives) bloom as a result. Who was it that said care for your characters equals care for your reader? Additionally, in this debut collection, you’ll find a committed eye for human interaction, some joyous dialogue, and a skill with character that often sees a half dozen of them emerge vibrant and distinct from a breakneck, event-heavy passage.
Those readers familiar with Wood’s work will arrive here clued up and, no doubt, paid up. Last year’s Outsiders, an invigorating collection published by 3 of Cups Press, showcased the likes of Lara Williams and Julia Armfield, but it was Wood’s tremendous Francine that burst most effervescently from its pages. A pointed examination of music festival mores, the story follows a group of friends whose campsite area at Glastonbury is infringed by a mysterious interloper. Narrative norms suggest we pop corn and hunker down for the inevitable flashpoint. It never comes. It is their unquestioning acceptance of the quiet and troubled Francine into their space that causes to reader to connect. Like the ‘grey haired double denim men… oblivious to us or else quite happy to have us jostling into their gig’ as Hawkwind (or more accurately ‘a Hawkwind splinter group’—natch) perform their psyche anthem ‘Master of the Universe’, Wood’s stories express a refreshing curiosity about the possibilities of kinship and community.
That much was certainly true of her Galley Beggar Press Short Story triumph ‘When can you start?’ and it’s true of this riveting debut collection as a whole. That winning short re-appears here and it slots neatly into a series of stories that delve deeper into the life of its spirited protagonist Annie Marshall. We first encounter her as a teenager in the story ‘Rise Up Singing’. As her home town of Bolton swelters during a rare hot spell, Annie and her school friends struggle to remain focused on an English lesson as an acid trip takes hold:
‘Claire was stroking her copy of Pride and Prejudice and crying. “There’s no need for any of this,” she said, her voice quiet and bleak.’
Saved by the bell, Annie and Janey gleefully prepare for a night out. There is Cointreau, a spliff, ‘another half tab each’, a bottle of Pernod to be sneaked into the club. Cocaine, of course. And the dizzying highs of being young and free: a state of being that Wood sketches in delightful detail. The scene in which the girls, post-club and nearly home, flop onto the pavement only to be confronted by a threatening dog is a warmly comic delight:
‘“Dogs know when you’re tripping,” said Janey, very quietly. This is true, I thought. The dog knows. He was in a frenzy of growling and twitching now. He was headbutting the fence. Janey had a look of delighted horror.
“Just walk slowly away,” I told her. This was a serious situation requiring a serious voice.’
They make it home, they drink Horlicks, they share pyjamas. Annie’s father appears and cheerfully asks them about their evening. No one raises a fist, or even a voice. How… odd. How wonderful. If you read anything this year that so vividly captures the thrill of a lazy trip (‘I noticed my ears slipping gently and endlessly toward my neck while Janey was tapping her arm to see if it was solid’) or the casual security of friendship (‘“You’re a good girl,” she told me, stroking my shoulders, gently stroking me. “We’re good girls.”’), consider yourself lucky indeed.
Elsewhere, Annie and her friends navigate the path to adulthood: corporate toil; the grey-light-of-dawn horror of the unplanned hook-up; the occasional detour into the life of a previously minor character. Yes Yes More More requires a little unpicking, and that itself brings a particular type of satisfaction. Some stories leave the narrator un-named. Others pull the rug a little, revealing something about a character from a point several years beyond the last time we saw them. It is all very elegantly assembled—Wood’s logistical skill dovetails sweetly into the book’s moral design.
Much like Claire Louise-Bennett’s Pond, Yes Yes More More breezes through with the natural hauteur of the novel despite having been told it’s, huh, a book of short stories. Like that wayward soul-mate, it eschews natural conventions of jeopardy, even when it appears to be abruptly switching gear and playing with conventional tropes. Take ‘At the Log Cabin by the Lake in the Middle of the Woods’, a story seemingly set to apply the ‘final girl’ format to Karen and Claire’s loch-side break. The story’s murmur of dread is ultimately resolved by little more than a kettle being switched on and the promise of a soothing hot drink before bed, but not before Wood gently reveals the situation’s real gnawing fear: ‘This thought had half-occurred to Claire, too — that they were not the sort of people to stay in a place like this.’
The book’s best and most deeply affecting story is Lauren, Our Path Emerges For a While. That title: it has the quality of a hymnal, spoken quietly and upward, hands clasped tightly. Narrated by the mother of Lauren, who, we come to learn, has died, it explores connection and re-connection as she and Claire (who was in the car crash that killed her friend) meet for the first time in decades: ‘She stopped and we hugged and I think we conjured Lauren with our coincidence. I’d say I hugged her for too long, so we were in agreement there.’ There are stories to told, moments to be remembered, half-secrets to be shared. The passage in which Claire recounts a visit to the house shortly after Lauren’s death will cause you to quiver, but it will make you a fuller person, too. Wood performs a bravura technical feat part way through, switching viewpoints. I have to give you this from every angle, she seems to be saying; the weight of this grief is too much for just one voice. The women’s shared loss gradually heads towards friendship: the reader is offered something with the vague outline of comfort, of relief. ‘And then, then, and then. Me and Mrs Fletcher met up again a week later, by the pond. On purpose this time.’
This is a book about what it takes to be alive, a field guide to living life as well as we possibly can, while we can. To enter the whirring tumult of these characters’ lives does nothing but expand the possibilities of our own. Yes Yes More More proposes, with rare fluency, that we are always better off together. It takes a writer of serious guile to conclude that not only do we have more in common than that which divides us, but to further argue that even this bruised clarion of liberal debate might just be worth exploiting as a viable dramatic impetus for the best kind of British storytelling. And this, make no mistake, is formidable storytelling. A debut to be savoured, one that heralds the arrival of a distinct and vital new voice.
Yes Yes More More is published by The Indigo Press, 6th May 2021