FICTION:Communion Town By Sam Thompson Fourth Estate, 278pp. £14.99
COMMUNION TOWN is a collection of short stories. Exactly why it has been published with the intriguing, enticing but utterly inaccurate subtitle A City in Ten Chapters reveals far more about publishing hype than it does about the book. What’s wrong with publishing a collection of stories? Absolutely nothing. Why call it a novel when it is irrefutably a collection? What could be more honourable than a story collection?
Devotees of the short-story form, which is currently as strong as it ever was, would be fully justified in bristling at the idea that, perhaps to secure due respect, this collection has been presented as a novel, something it is clearly not. Sam Thompson’s meticulous debut of finely honed performance pieces – some of which impress, several of which pay homage to his masters (Poe, Borges and Calvino, among others), only two of which fully engage – is presented as a narrative devoted to the theme of a city. Admittedly each of these standalone stories is set in a city, yet the setting is but a backdrop; a most tenuous connection is imposed upon the book.
Why do this to the reader? Far more importantly, why do it to Thompson? Still, it must have worked, as this book has been longlisted for this year’s Man Booker Prize. Its inclusion on the list raises an obvious comparison with Keith Ridgway’s far more convincing and cohesive city novel, Hawthorn and Child, which was overlooked. Ridgway’s evocation of a city is vividly sustained.
Last year the British writer Stuart Evers published a collection, Ten Stories about Smoking, which was just that: 10 stories based on a unifying theme, cigarettes. Communion Town, portentous in tone and coolly assured in execution, by striving towards a common thematic premise, highlights the fact that there isn’t one. And should it matter?
In the opening title sequence the narrator, an official of sorts, addresses one of a couple who have apparently arrived in a place as asylum seekers. The narrator is explaining a random act of brutality that the newcomer, apparently a woman, may have noticed: “Drawing closer, you caught sight of what they had cornered. I’m sorry you had to go through that, but I suppose in truth it was a rite of passage into our city more significant than any agency interview.”
Elsewhere in the same story the narrator asks: “Have you noticed how each of us conjures up our own city? You have your secret haunts and private landmarks and favourite short cuts, and I have mine, so we navigate the streets each of us walks through a world of our own invention.” It is an odd question to put to asylum seekers. The rhetoric is that of an essay, not a story, never mind a novel.
The more dreamlike aspects of the narratives are consistently overwhelmed by Thompson’s formidable intellectualism. He teases his observations with a philosophical intent that is interesting, if detached. It is impossible to believe in these stories, and the “story” in the more abstract pieces is but a minor element. Ironically, one of the more convincing narratives, The City Room, a marvellously Borgesian tale, centres on a toy metropolis created by a little boy who is aware that some day he will knock it all down.
Thompson is drawn to literary genres and enjoys playing with voices. In Gallathea, he becomes Raymond Chandler and creates his own down-at-heel Philip Marlowe-like narrator: “So with zero surprise I heard out what you had to say. You yourself were the missing person in your story.” Thompson is having fun.
In a heavy-handedly amusing pastiche, The Significant City of Lazarus Glass, he attempts, far less successfully, to assume the voice of Arthur Conan Doyle in a narrative that all too quickly reveals its outcome.
By far the best story, and the one by which Thompson the writer to date will be judged, is Good Slaughter, set in an abattoir. This shows that Thompson is a talented writer, capable of astute description and with a feel for detail. The narrator watches a new manager, his every action, every word. The man, an able bully brought brilliantly to life by Thompson, recalls a night on which the gas administered to stun the waiting animals was faulty: “They were halfway down the line, some of them, but they started waking up, and I promise you they sounded exactly like people when they screamed. Whole place echoing like a church.”
Teju Cole’s beautifully oblique Open City (2011), a novel written as memoir, celebrates the city, all cities, in a way that Thompson may admire but certainly has not emulated.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent
