It’s
my great pleasure and privilege to welcome this, Emma Martin’s
first book, into the world. Some of these stories have had public
lives already: ‘The Nest’ in Sport 37, ‘Victor’ in New Short
Stories 5, and the story that won the prestigious Commonwealth Prize,
and for which the collection is titled: Two Girls in a Boat.
Of
that story, the Chair of the panel Bernadine Evaristo said:
It
fulfilled the judges’ brief that the winning entry have linguistic
flair, originality, depth and daring. The story was chosen for its
gorgeous, elegant and spare writing; its nuanced handling of time,
place and relationships; its daring, provocative subject matter and
clear-eyed exploration of the choice of heterosexual conformity in
the face of sexual mutability.
Another
of the judges, Craig Cliff who is here tonight, says,
Late
in my reading, I came across ‘Two Girls in a Boat’, a story that,
beneath its detached and polished prose, was also deeply
agitated….With its blend of sadness, humour and everyday magic,
‘Two Girls in a Boat’ shot to the top of my list... I’m
delighted to see a collection of Emma’s stories now being
published. May her work continue to travel widely.
The
story ‘Two Girls in a Boat’ was published by Granta online and
although all writers know you should never read the comments, the
ones below this story’s web page are an exception: ‘your handling
of the theme is superb… haunting prose… perfect pacing…
touching… one of the best short stories I’ve read in a very long
time.’
It’s
not just testament to the good taste of Granta readers and
Commonwealth Prize judges, but to the calibre of Emma’s writing,
which is clear, supple, honest, and fine. All of the stories are a
pleasure to read at the level of the sentence and, if language is the
boat that carries the story’s content, their emotional freight is
no less important.
The
effect of reading these stories is multidimensional; they move back
in time and to the other side of the globe, pass through different
kinds of lives, are visited by death and birth. From Tekapo to the
Balkans, and from a middle-class child’s birthday party to the
inside of a jail cell, they speak to and of human vulnerability. But
they’re tough, too. They do what stories at their best can do which
is give everything value. Their overriding quality is empathy,
particularly for those who break the rules, who transgress in ways
either human or hard to understand. I wondered, reading one in
particular, whether Emma had specifically challenged herself to write
a compassionate story about the sort of person it is really
hard to feel compassion for. But whatever the generative force, the
story speaks for itself.
Emma
is a writer who knows the names of things, and in her prose the
things are allowed to speak for themselves. She can light up an image
or space or scenario with just the right words and rhythms. I was
lucky enough to read her MA thesis for the IIML in 2009, and though
there’s plenty of new work in this collection I came across
memorable phrases with a pleasing chime of recognition: A girl with
an eye for the main chance looking at a man’s wallet, ‘her eyes
sliding towards [it], as if she were a compass and it were her
north.’ The ‘downy’ pods of broad beans. This, from the title
story: ‘A cyclist glided by, his bike tick-ticking in the quiet
night.’
Her
characters negotiate choice and consequence, chance and, often, a
rough deal. Their struggles are significant even though sometimes
understated, and we want the best for them. Happily, survival takes
many forms: the stories know that life can and does go on after
crises and it is in the what-happens-after that sometimes the deeper
insight is gained. They take us through the crisis and beyond, into
the human moments where guards are dropped and a kind of complicated
truth is allowed to stream in.
In
a world where we’re so punitive about some things, and so willing
to let other damage go unchecked, we’re in great and ongoing need
of compassion. These stories bloom with empathy for the thief, the
bewildered and angry, the disastrously shallow… through that
empathy and insight Emma opens up in us, the readers, the space to
feel compassion, to understand that we are not separate; that all of
us, along with those two girls of the title, are in the same boat. It
puts me in mind of that wonderful phrase of Grace Paley’s –
‘Every character, real or imagined, deserves the open destiny of
life.’ In Emma’s stories she has placed her characters in
dangerous territory familiar to us all, and given them the dignity of
their own maps. Many of them feature, in different forms, a lost
child, sometimes an adult child, who somehow finds the capacity to
make themselves a home, a comfort, a safe place – even if it is
under a house. This is the refuge of Agnes, the neglected schoolgirl
in The Below, who covets a classmate’s set of marbles:
‘Her
favourite are the cat’s eyes. She picks one up. It is clear, with a
tricolour swoosh. If you close one eye and put the marble right up to
the other, you can see tiny bubbles of air inside the glass. It’s
like there’s a whole world in there. Like the marble is a planet;
or, the marble is the universe and the bubbles are its stars. She
holds it up to the light and squints into it.’
This
is a lovely book, insightful, humane, and a pleasure to read. As
Agnes observes of the marble, ‘it’s like there’s a whole world
in there.’ There ought to be a bottle of champagne to smash against
the prow of this fictional boat, but in place of that I’ll ask you
to charge your glasses and join me in toasting its great success.
Emily Perkins May 2, 2013.
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