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This is an astonishing collection – which has a consistent quality and intensity throughout, a very rare thing, especially as the stories take in such a range of eras and settings. They also range in length, from 60 pages down to The Astronaut which is barely more than a page, and yet nevertheless complete – a whole story not a fragment.
The opener A Thousand Acres of English Soil is perhaps the more horrific, a tragedy in the Greek sense – I was left so deeply affected by it, having read it at the start of a train journey I just had to sit shell shocked for the remainder of the journey.
Ending with Snorri & Frosti, which echoes Chatwin’s On Black Hill, again there was a palpable sense of grief for them – that desire to somehow make the outcome something other than the inevitable.
It is a deep collection, but honest in that, and not playing for cheap emotions but speaking of the authentic harshness of so many lives, the loneliness of so many men.
It is not often that I read anything as good as this.
