“Publishers are shy of short stories in the here and now,” writes Janice Galloway at the end of this collection, “shy like people are shy of three-legged puppies, which is to say they’d love to give them a home, but are nervous of their apparent handicap.” That slightly weird simile is vintage Galloway, an askew observation packaging a bridled, tentative empathy. Although in recent years she has had more attention for her two very fine memoirs, This Is Not About Me and All Made Up, which both foregrounded the fabricated nature of memory, it was as a fiction writer that she first came to attention. Her debut, The Trick Is to Keep Breathing, about a schoolteacher’s nervous breakdown, has the dubious honour of being a set text on the Scottish English curriculum. It was followed by Foreign Parts and Clara, her biographical novel about the Schumanns, with short story collections between each of the novels.
This new collection revisits many of the themes found in the novels, and to an extent rewrites and reworks her interest in them. The story “and drugs and rock and roll” looks at women in extremis, in a psychiatric ward. There’s Alma, who wants only to return to the “horrible daily business of owning your own life”, and whose nurse gives her temazepam with the wry aside, “Folk are paying over the odds for this in Paisley and here’s you getting it for free” – darkly continuing that the hospital will “be private this time next year, you wait and see. You might be the last of a dying breed, Alma.” Individual and societal breakdown have always rhymed in Galloway’s work.
The role of music, so central to Clara and the memoirs, returns in “opera” and “fine day”, and in a more dyspeptic form in the deliciously sour story “burning love” in which a spurned lover torches his partner’s belongings to the strains of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. (The books that go up in flames include a significant amount of the female canon, not uncritically judged – Doris Lessing is described as “looking like she disapproved of everyone who would never learn the lessons of the fucking veldt”.) One of the key techniques of The Trick Is to Keep Breathing and Foreign Parts was to chart how various texts – women’s magazines, guide books – constrict rather than liberate their readers. Curiously, it is the men in this collection whose mouths are full of hand-me-down phrases: “fine day” makes acerbic use of “reassess his needs”, “find his space” and “to be without having to explain himself”. Foreign Parts was, in part, about how a change of scene does not always effect a change of mind or heart, and many of these stories look at dislocation both physically and mentally. In “almost 1948” we observe George Orwell’s last days on Jura, and Galloway treats him with a wry scepticism (he crops up again in the final story, “distance”, unimpressing students). The titular story, an exquisite piece about the elegiac period of a final holiday before a child starts school, also uses the trip as a tripwire. The desperate clinging to innocence is deftly done. The narrator, Monica, realises her son’s world “rested on a terrifying level of trust that shocked and moved her”.
The parent-child relationship runs through this collection – the epigraph, “Literature is mostly about having sex and not much about having children; life’s the other way round”, comes from David Lodge – and this focus represents something new in Galloway’s work. The piece “distance” is like an orchestral tutti of all these themes. A damaged woman, who becomes hypervigilant after her son has an accident, decides it’s best for her to force him and her partner away. She travels to Jura, and has a car accident with a deer while the aria of Mozart’s Queen of the Night plays on the radio. The ending is a kind of secular, trans-species pietà, and reflects another new concern. Previously very much a city writer, here the natural world encroaches on Galloway’s work from the title onwards, both indifferent and essential. Even a three-legged dog can bite.
On that point: Galloway has turned to a small Scottish independent publisher for this book. Although in terms of design, Freight have improved markedly (there are still a few irksome typos), this book is short but not slight, though inflated by wide margins and a full page grab-quote preceding each story. I wonder if readers would be more willing to spend £12.99 on it if the dog had, perhaps, a prosthetic fourth leg. There are a number of fugitive texts by Galloway – the poetry collection Boy Book See, the artistic collaborations Pipelines and Rosengarten, the libretto for the opera Monster – which more than merit republication.
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