When the city’s fluorescence, its frenetic denial of night, has started to lose its fascination, there will always be those who take flight to the imagined countryside.
Habituated, however, to their urban habitat, they remain encumbered by its culture, carrying its Saturday supplement worldview with them. Ducks out of ship canal water, they flock to their own kind, similarly displaced, quacking at one another on the village pond, largely oblivious to the impression that they are creating, and the feathers that are ruffled in the process.
In Precipitation, Ailsa Cox’s triptych of short stories, set here against the understated embellishment of Patricia Farrell’s illustrations, hold in common the thematic backdrop of the city dweller’s retreat into village life, and the abrasions that follow from their street-smart unwittingness.
For me, the centrepiece is Cox’s second tale, Stan’s House, in which Fleur, the protagonist, is marked out not merely by having friends in Manchester but in being a poet to boot. The calling is one she conceals from her new neighbours; a decision born, seemingly, as much from shame as tact. Perhaps such discretion is well-advised, since one villager in particular takes a dislike to her; the irrationality of her prejudice making the unwelcoming Yvonne a more vivid figure in her life than Fleur’s own partner, Jon, who drifts out of it with less inconvenience than the internet connection going down. Yvonne and her deceased brother Stan, of the titular house, are fleshed out in the fictions that Fleur tells herself about them, redrafted with every new fact she gleans. The subtlety of the story’s resolution is that, in revealing the truth about Stan, it tells the reader still more about Fleur; the license she finally extends to him speaking volumes about her character.
Cox’s opening offering, Heavy Showers and Thunder, is also concerned with the stories that people invent to fill in the blank space left by the unreadable thoughts of others, although the bereavement shared by its protagonists, and viewed from three different angles, is closer to their bones. Its dividing lines, likewise, are multiple – a compound fracture of place, age and class, shattered by a common grief and sustained by recrimination.
If the mistrust and misunderstanding that maintain the distance between the bereaved of Heavy Showers is rooted in their private mythologies, The Empty Quarter‘s after-effects derive from a determined disavowal of rootedness, a full-blown retreat into a travelogue fantasy of widescreen adventure. It reads as a fable of the fabulist, a cautionary tale about the inadvisability of living the daydream, a fiction about fiction. Of course, the peril in writing about writers is that one eventually writes oneself into a corner, writing only to writers in an ever-decreasing circle. There is something of this in the fate of The Empty Quarter’s protagonist.
Like its companions, it’s a tale that requires a Sunday speed of life, an attention undivided by the voracious chirruping of phone notifications. As the title’s collection suggests, these are stories suited to the backdrop of rain or birdsong, a stillness against which the chiming of their verities can reverberate, a quietness in which to shudder with disquiet.
Precipitation by Ailsa Cox, with images by Patricia Farrell, published by Confingo, is available to buy. For more information, click here.