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Hair Side, Flesh Side, by Helen Marshall
Jul. 18th, 2017 07:50 pmIt's my intention to break out of blogger's block by doing a few short book reviews this week, so, with no more ado, Helen Marshall's debut short story collection, the unsettling Hair Side, Flesh Side.
The phrase "hair side, flesh side" refers in the book--in the story "A Texture Like Velvet"--to the feel of old manuscripts written on cured skin, usually vellum, and it makes a good evocation of Marshall's work as a whole because that's the book in a nutshell: an uncanny and very physical approach to scholarship. Hair Side, Flesh Side is full of history, academics, and the ghosts of dead authors. Sometimes this is done with a veneer of wistfulness, as when the protagonist of "Dead White Men" grapples with the knowledge that his lover is just using his body as a vehicle for the spirits of the dead authors she reveres, and sometimes it's done with great thematic weight, as in "The Book of Judgement," where Lucifer tampers with Jane Austen's fate, and sometimes it's just the ghost of Chaucer commiserating with you about what a douche you've gone home with. The tonal and thematic variations there keep the collection interesting even after you've gotten a clear sense of Marshall's favorite devices.
The best stories are the ones that blend ghostliness and art with the body itself. In "Blessed," a young girl receives the body of a saint for her seventh birthday, an extravagance in a world where most children are only lucky enough to get a finger bone or, worse, a forgery. But it's her father and stepmother who give her Saint Lucia and it's to her mother's house, and her mother's furious resentment, that she returns afterwards. Marshall takes the headiness of, say, a ghost of Joan of Arc who spontaneously burns herself when she's angry and combines it with the simmering tension of a bad divorce and the way parents can use their children as battlegrounds. "Sanditon," possibly my favorite here, centers on a down-at-the-heels editor who finds the completed manuscript of Jane Austen's Sanditon growing out of her body:
The outside bits were easy enough, where the skin had peeled back from the fissure, but she didn't want to cause any more damage. She fingered the papery tissue carefully, with her right hand, used her left hand to zoom and snap. The first twenty pictures were awful, but after several hours she found that she was starting to get the hang of it.
That makes me shudder, but the specificity of it is excellent, as is the way the manuscript in Hanna's body draws her into an increasingly close and increasingly more unnerving affair with a married author desperate to use Sanditon to increase his fame.
Marshall is best when she stays closest to the body and uses that to make the intangible tangible. The stories that go into full surrealism, like "This Feeling of Flying," or traditional magical realism, like "In the High Places of the World," are less successful. But no other writer would have written "Sanditon," and I'm not convinced any writer would even have thought of it, and now I'll always remember it.
The phrase "hair side, flesh side" refers in the book--in the story "A Texture Like Velvet"--to the feel of old manuscripts written on cured skin, usually vellum, and it makes a good evocation of Marshall's work as a whole because that's the book in a nutshell: an uncanny and very physical approach to scholarship. Hair Side, Flesh Side is full of history, academics, and the ghosts of dead authors. Sometimes this is done with a veneer of wistfulness, as when the protagonist of "Dead White Men" grapples with the knowledge that his lover is just using his body as a vehicle for the spirits of the dead authors she reveres, and sometimes it's done with great thematic weight, as in "The Book of Judgement," where Lucifer tampers with Jane Austen's fate, and sometimes it's just the ghost of Chaucer commiserating with you about what a douche you've gone home with. The tonal and thematic variations there keep the collection interesting even after you've gotten a clear sense of Marshall's favorite devices.
The best stories are the ones that blend ghostliness and art with the body itself. In "Blessed," a young girl receives the body of a saint for her seventh birthday, an extravagance in a world where most children are only lucky enough to get a finger bone or, worse, a forgery. But it's her father and stepmother who give her Saint Lucia and it's to her mother's house, and her mother's furious resentment, that she returns afterwards. Marshall takes the headiness of, say, a ghost of Joan of Arc who spontaneously burns herself when she's angry and combines it with the simmering tension of a bad divorce and the way parents can use their children as battlegrounds. "Sanditon," possibly my favorite here, centers on a down-at-the-heels editor who finds the completed manuscript of Jane Austen's Sanditon growing out of her body:
The outside bits were easy enough, where the skin had peeled back from the fissure, but she didn't want to cause any more damage. She fingered the papery tissue carefully, with her right hand, used her left hand to zoom and snap. The first twenty pictures were awful, but after several hours she found that she was starting to get the hang of it.
That makes me shudder, but the specificity of it is excellent, as is the way the manuscript in Hanna's body draws her into an increasingly close and increasingly more unnerving affair with a married author desperate to use Sanditon to increase his fame.
Marshall is best when she stays closest to the body and uses that to make the intangible tangible. The stories that go into full surrealism, like "This Feeling of Flying," or traditional magical realism, like "In the High Places of the World," are less successful. But no other writer would have written "Sanditon," and I'm not convinced any writer would even have thought of it, and now I'll always remember it.