Paperback reviews: New Welsh Short Stories by Francesca Rhydderch and Penny Thomas, Music Night at the Apollo by Lilian Pizzichini

The tales in New Welsh Short Stories share a sense of place, but little else

Stories share a sense of place, but little else (Wales Tourist Board)

New Welsh Short Stories ed by Francesca Rhydderch and Penny Thomas

Seren £9.99

When reviewing a collection of short stories one has to single out a few for special mention. The difficulty here is that I’d give special mention to all 19 of these stories, by writers either born or living in Wales, if space allowed. The collection has no theme, as such. Yet certain commonalities can be observed: clarity of writing, a strong sense of place, a recurring tinge of melancholy, an interest in youth and adolescence, night-time. Tom Morris’s “17” is a marvellous coming-of-age story told in short, numbered scenes, combining humour and pathos; Joao Morais’s “Yes King Fu” is a great slice of comic Cardiff urban realism, as if written by a Welsh Irvine Welsh; “No One is Looking at You”, by Deborah Kay Davies, is about puberty and family power struggles and a bikini, with an ending I still can’t quite work out (I will go back to it); “A Letter from Wales”, by Cynan Jones, is a brilliant scientific detective story in the manner of H G Wells; Kate Hamer’s “Crocodile Hearts” is a twisted tale about a neighbour who keeps crocodiles in the garden – like many of these stories, the action takes place at night and one might also mention here Tyler Keevil’s “Night Start”, which is about an epiphany on a hot June night with a hint of the supernatural about it. Carys Davies’s “Mr Philip” is a story about bereavement, in which a pair of shoes becomes a symbol for grieving – yet it has an unexpectedly uplifting ending. Not all the stories are set in Wales: Eluned Gramich’s “Pulling Out” is about a Japanese boy who returns to Tokyo after a year in England, to find that his brother has not left his bedroom the whole time he was away. I’m sorry I have no space left to mention the others.

*****

Music Night at the Apollo by Lilian Pizzichini

Bloomsbury £8.99

In 2006, Lilian Pizzichini sold her flat and went to live on a houseboat on the Grand Union Canal in Southall. She battles, but more often gives in to her addictions to drugs and alcohol, as she roams the neighbourhood, open to every experience, meeting a gallery of characters: Noah, the Traveller who claims to be a bare-knuckle fighter but is better known for slashing a dealer’s stomach with a knife; Pete, an ex-burglar and her occasional boyfriend; the prostitutes Carly and Echoe; Spider (real name Surdeep), the Sikh with the outsize kirpan; the hooded Somali boys who sell crack in the streets. Pizzichini is never judgemental, but always sympathetic to vulnerability. At the same time, she researches the history of her own family, who lived in the area in the 1930s when it was a white, working-class neighbourhood. She haunts the pubs, wanders past the Sikh temples, explores the wasteground of Bixley Fields. It’s a great slice of psychogeography – but much better written than psychogeography usually is.

****

The Quest for a Moral Compass by Kenan Malik

Atlantic Books £9.98

This investigation into moral thought is billed as philosophy, but is better described as a history of ideas: it is a survey of morality from Homer all the way up to Sam Harris, taking in Aristotle’s virtue ethics, Christian and Islamic belief in God as the guarantor of morals, Buddhism, Confucianism, the duty ethics of Kant, and the utilitarianism of Mill. It’s clear and well-written, and I like Malik’s defence of ethical universalism. But some ideas are necessarily dealt with perfunctorily, or not at all. There is nothing about feminism, when surely the idea that women should have the same rights as men is a huge ethical advance. Malik also dismisses rather too peremptorily Sam Harris’s case for a scientific study of morality.

****

The Architect’s Apprentice by Elif Shafak

Penguin £8.99

I tend to look askance at novels with apostrophes in the title, and I’m afraid The Architect’s Apprentice only confirmed my prejudice. Set in the Ottoman Empire in the 16th century, it tells the story of a boy, Jahan, who comes to Istanbul as mahout to an elephant for the Sultan. By chance Jahan meets the master architect, Sinan, and becomes his pupil. There’s plotting and intrigue and colourful characters, and a beautiful wayward princess, and lush descriptions of domes and fountains and gazelles and rosewater and peacocks, with a sprinkling of Arabic words to add verisimilitude: magic realism without the magic, in other words. I couldn’t get very interested in Jahan’s journey. Sorry.

**

Missing Microbes by Martin Blaser

Oneworld £8.99

Microbes are far more important than we might think. They render our planet habitable. Martin Blaser says that our microbiome – the sum total of microbes living on and in each one of us – should best be thought of as an organ; without it, you’d rapidly die, as surely as if your liver was removed. You host some hundred trillion bacteria cells, compared to the thirty trillion human cells that make up your body. But all is not well with our microbes. Indiscriminate use of antibiotics has led to harmful bacteria developing resistance. At the same time, damage to our microbiomes could be causing epidemics in asthma and obesity. This is excellent popular science, which even scientific know-nothings like me can understand.

****