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Singing a Man to Death

This volume consists of twelve short stories, some realistic, others containing elements of the fantastic, set in Britain and abroad, the past and the present. While several of them have their roots in the author’s reading (for example on cargo cults or the medieval Assassin sect), none are the product of intensive scholarly research. They do, however, represent the culmination of a longstanding interest in fiction, and the short story genre in particular. The title story, for example, draws on and responds to the use of narrative epiphany in Joyce’s ‘Araby’ and Dylan Thomas’s ‘Remarkable Little Cough’. ‘Sleevenotes’ is constructed as a succession of sections, each exactly five hundred words long, that try and fail to tell the same story while gradually revealing more of it. While the technical constraint here is reminiscent of OuLiPo and such contemporary OuLiPo-influenced writers as Richard Beard and Jeff Noon, it is also an instance of the metafictional method of making the production of the text part of its own subject-matter. ‘The Lovers’ and ‘Between the Walls’ both challenge the reliability of the narrative by using multiple points of view, while the use of the second person in ‘Assassin’ has the effect (also used in some of the author’s poems) of making the narrative seem provisional so that the reader’s active participation is required for it to continue. In these respects, the volume’s main investigative contribution lies in testing and analysing the value of the formal parameters and ‘rules’ governing narrative perspective, narrative construction and narrative veracity.