BOOK REVIEW / Behold, superlative penguins: Eva Salzman on the deceptively light but rebellious black comedy in the new collection of stories by A L Kennedy: Now that you're back - A L Kennedy: Cape, pounds 8.99

Eva Salzman
Saturday 19 March 1994 00:02 GMT
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BOLD AND original are the sort of off-the-peg terms one hardly dares use of a writer like A L Kennedy, but the trouble is, they fit. Young and Scottish - don't hold that against her - she was lauded as one of the 'Best of Young British' novelists, on the strength of her first book. Don't hold that against her either.

The short stories in this collection have a disembodied quality about them, which gives a most satisfying feeling of discomfort and discontinuity - things the contemporary reader has almost come to expect. Proper names are often mentioned in the most haphazard way, as secondary pieces of information. There is an eerie lack of points of reference, and concrete, functional detail - all of which come cheap with other writers. Even so, Kennedy's rather cheeky non-sequiturs do take some deciphering.

Traditionalists and shrinking violets will no doubt be allergic to Kennedy's deadpan style and unapologetically odd tone - in one story the husband is allergic to his wife's skin; Her highlights are certainly quirky, and impatient readers may grow frustrated both at what is left out and what is left in. The stories are like windows into an expansive building, though you are only ever permitted a glimpse into one small room. Little attention is paid to arranging all the paraphernalia of scene-setting, as if that particular structural convention were spurious, or extinct. Kennedy is simply not that sort of writer.

Certainly, her healthy disdain for anything predictable makes the work not entirely reader-friendly; but there is never the sense that Kennedy is just dribbling the ball, and may drop it - there is no contrivance to drop. The blase and confident narrator - simultaneously close to and remote from her subjects - depicts a reality without context, definition without object, elucidation without explanation.

If in doubt, cross-refer to the following entries from 'The Mouseboks Family Dictionary': 'NORMALITY: See What You Deserve. Also a disturbing quality, always to be distrusted'; or 'WHAT FOR: A question, perfectly describing what the questioner will receive on having asked for it.'

It is striking - and heartening - how genderless this writing is; those with various axes to grind might consider this a weakness too. Several of the stories are effortlessly told from a male perspective. Few writers escape their sex in this way - indeed sex often defines writing. But the imagination is reputedly pre-sexual, after all, and Kennedy is nothing if not imaginative: especially in her approach to the mundane, in stories like 'Now That You're Back', 'Christine' and 'Armageddon Blue or Poised On the Brink of Becoming A Magnificent Success'.

Kennedy absolutely relishes her numerous conceits; when she invents one, she will not let it go until it has been enlarged into something wild and absurd. The wacky oracular tone in 'Having More Sense' is typical of her wry humour. Here is a guru speaking to his disciples: 'behold the penguin . . . Trust in me as you would trust a penguin . . . slip your hands into the steady flippers of this paragon of birds and make ready to learn the superlative joys of its path. At this juncture it may be a man will cry out, 'But, Wise Old Man, what am I to a penguin and what is a penguin to me?' . . . My answer is as clear as sunrise, but conveniently smaller.'

Truisms get a good working over in this piece. More spooky is their handling via the unreliable narrator of 'A Perfect Possession', whose initial seemingly wise interpretations of love - 'Of course, no little boy likes to think and we expect to do that for him until he is grown and responsible. This is a burden to us, but a light and pleasant one' - are revealed to be alarmingly misshapen: 'We need only say that he is ugly with sin and now we must call upon our God-given love to claim him for beauty so that good may triumph in all our hearts. We will release him from himself and hear him thank us for it.' Kennedy has a knack for couching the truly awful, the grim, in the most deceptively benign tones.

She does have her lighter side; it just happens to be pretty heavy too. 'Mixing With the Folks Back Home' is a letter from the wife of a serial killer to her daughter, revealing her story for the first time in language made rather cosy by the homespun platitudes of family life: 'Robert McConnerey Coons, I don't see why you and your precious serial killing should mean I have to be uprooted from every darn thing I know,' complains the mother, unwilling to move away from home. She finishes with touching maternal solicitude: 'Which pretty much wraps it up, sweetheart. I'll sign off now before your Father gets back . . . Like your Papa says, 'Our kind of folks stay close, it doesn't matter what' . . . Pleasant dreams and good night.'

Kennedy's writing suffers none of the symptoms of British Quaint-Disease, or any similar affliction the more old-fashioned novelist seems prone to. Her frivolity is quite unique, and of a high order. She excels at black comedy of the most refreshingly rebellious sort, perfectly suited to the punchlines (in so far as there are any) of life's complicated and improbable jokes. If in doubt, just check the Dictionary: 'LIFE: See Bad Joke. See also What You Deserve. See also Nightmares (Waking).'

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