Chris Wiegand
As Y2K dropped, London-based writer Amy Prior wasn’t thinking about the new millennium. Her thoughts were with passed eras populated by teddy boys, ’50s teenagers and matinee idols. When Serpent’s Tail asked her to come up with a theme for a new short story anthology, the former charity shop clothes model decided to explore our obsession with the past:
"The idea was very much related to the people I knew at the time. There was a woman I knew who dressed up like Betty Page and this guy who looks like someone from The Cramps. I wanted to show this culture that hadn’t been represented in literary fiction before."
The anthology features stories by a variety of authors from both sides of the Atlantic, including acclaimed veteran Joyce Carol Oates as well as newer revelations Tobias Hill and Eleanor Knight. Predictably, the main focus is with retrospective culture. This is the case with two of the best American contributions – Brett Ellen Block’s "Future Tense" and Pagan Kennedy’s "Glitter."
In "Future Tense" an old man struggling for his life after a fight in a bus station clings to his memories of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The story is told from the perspective of a detached young man who has dropped out of an air-conditioning repair school and is traveling home for the vacation to re-think his future. In "Glitter," the narrator is an art school drop-out who seeks refuge in a secondhand clothes store run by a glamorous transvestite. The Baltimore store is so imaginatively depicted by Kennedy that you can almost smell the secondhand leather jackets and feel the threadbare cords crammed on the rails.
Both Block’s old man and Kennedy’s adolescent are offered a sense of security in troubled times by their precoccupation with the past. In her introduction, Prior quotes U.S. cultural critic Marshall McLuhan: "When faced with a totally new situation, we tend always to attach ourselves to the flavour of the most recent past. We look at the present through a rearview mirror." Many of the characters in the collection are on the verge of new situations and look to the past for comfort. The editor’s own story, "Miss Shima," is the compassionate tale of a lonely Chinese woman living in London, who becomes obsessed with Grace Kelly and the glitz of Hollywood musicals.
The collection draws considerable diversity from a theme that at first glance suggests its limitations. Prior was weary of recent anthologies such as Disco Biscuits where "every story was set in a rave in the ’80s," so made sure her writers’ brief wasn’t too restrictive. The authors have subsequently explored the past in a number of different ways, which means the book is not – as cynics may presume – a bunch of tales about teenagers in junk shop clothes. Many are set in the past, so that it is the writers themselves who look back. Joyce Carol Oates’ lyrical "Strand Used Books 1956" concerns two teenage girls who spy Marilyn Monroe in a second-hand bookshop in New York. Tony White’s atmospheric "The Jet-Set Girls" is set in the back streets of 1950s London and revolves around the seedy world of a porn racket. The authors painstakingly re-create the aura of each town in their chosen decade.
Nicholas Royle and Christopher Kenworthy’s stories are slightly more surreal and haunting looks through McLuhan’s rearview mirror. Kenworthy’s revolves around a hair museum in Prague, where specialists trace the roots of past emotions in individual strands of human hair, offering the philosophy that "important events leave their mark on the world." Royle’s story is a captivating piece of psychogeography reminiscent of Iain Sinclair and told by an obsessive narrator who captures samples of air from cinemas to preserve the essence of each screening.
This is an impressively original, thought-provoking collection that forces readers to assess their own interests in the past. The stories have been ordered in an intelligent fashion, highlighting the occasional similarities between authors’ perspectives so that many work well as companion pieces to each other. The theme of the collection is so resonant and so universally applicable to the way we live today that you wonder why this sort of thing hasn’t been done before. Amy Prior’s next anthology will be a fresh alternative to the recent flood of commercial ‘chick-lit’ fiction, another original idea which will hopefully yield a similarly varied collection of stories.
