GREENFLY

Tom Lee

Harvill Secker, Paperback, 181 pp. , ISBN 1846551943, Price: £10

James Tanner

A collection of short stories can go down one of two paths. Either the author can attempt to show his versatility, or he can exhibit his virtuosity in one particular style. In Tom Lee’s Greenfly, Lee chooses the latter. In these dozen stories we find a consistent mood of oppression, claustrophobia and, in his better efforts, unsettling paranoia. In his lesser works, however, Lee merely picks one of a dizzying array of locales and infuses it with his signature gloom. . The quality of the stories varies drastically; in his best, he uses his obvious talent to provide us with other crucial elements of a good story, namely fleshed-out characters and a story.

The collection begins, unfortunately, with its weakest story, ‘Berlin’, which reads like a depressing travel guide. Even this unmemorable piece, though, shows some signs of real talent. I was fond of the arrestingly simple phrase: ‘She did not realize that the deepest desire of the jealous man is to have his jealousy vindicated’. Throughout the collection, Lee keeps his language tightly constrained à la Hemmingway, full of short sentences and a deliberately sparse vocabulary. Usually this works to good effect, but a few times it goes badly wrong. In the otherwise well-written ‘The Good Guy,’ I winced at the following: ‘ “Am I dying?” The doctor did not turn around. “We’re all dying.”’

The title story, ‘Greenfly’, is among the best in the collection; however, I wonder if Lee realized how similar it is to the high gothic piece ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ by Charlotte Gilman. The cooped-up woman suffering from obsessions or hallucinations brought on by her inactivity in male-imposed confinement has been done before. However, the light touch with which Lee creates foreboding domestic catastrophe is admirable, and was made all the more effective by the wise decision to eschew catharsis at the story’s close. The best piece in the collection, though, was ‘Cereology’. While the main plotline of an increasingly mad professor working on a science similar to phrenology is well-paced and would stand on its own, the framing device (a discovered diary of the professor’s wife) allows for a yet better sub-plot: her equally bizarre quest to make a type of Kama Sutra based on the instruments of an orchestra.

Perhaps the collection would have been best served had the orchestra idea been written out into its own comic (or at least absurd) story. While clearly Lee wished the claustrophobic moods of his stories to buttress one another, making the reader feel themselves to be in a continuously sinister environment, this can lead to anxiety-induced fatigue. In the same way that one giggles loudest at a slapstick joke when it diffuses the tension in a horror film, a piece temporarily lifting us out of the gloom could have served as a welcome contrast by the fourth or fifth piece of gothic tension, post-modern ennui and world-weary narrators.

But it is not the unchanging tone that most lets the stories down when they are read in succession. Rather, it is the intoxicating effect of being taken to so many locales and times in such quick succession; the reader is left jet-lagged. While Lee clearly understands the romance of the exotic, it sometimes seems as if he feels a story to be incomplete without this element. However, his best pieces are those in which he is not so focused on the scenery: ‘Greenfly’, ‘The Good Guy’ and ‘The Starving Millions’ are three excellent stories which are made all the better through not relying on a foreign setting. In too many of his other stories, Lee seems more concerned with where they are set than what is happening. ‘Berlin’, ‘Border’, and ‘San Francisco’ are the worst offenders here, as their titles well imply. Picking new and admittedly interesting places in which to establish an atmosphere is not enough without characters and a real narrative.

Lee’s enthusiasm for location might be well-served in the future in a longer format, which one hopes he will someday attempt. With only a single plotline to worry about, Lee would be freer to do what he does best, which is putting us in an exotic place and establishing a troubling, strange feeling that something bad is right around the corner. A novel form will allow him enough scope to ensure that the disquieting atmosphere he evokes so well is sufficiently underpinned by convincing characters and a strong narrative.