For better or for worse, stories are often held as magical things. As sources of healing or redemption, reliable routes to contentment. If we engage in stories, we are told, we will become more understanding, more empathetic, more patient. We will become better. In his debut short story collection, Mothers, London’s Chris Power challenges this assumption, though in the most interesting of ways.
Writing for The Guardian, Power has produced a long-running series or articles, ‘A brief survey of the short story’, exploring the entire gamut of short story writers, from Nabokov, Barthelme and Beckett to O’Connor, Munro and Bowles. Such a comprehensive and enthusiastic study betrays a deep affinity, and the way in which Power delves into the nuances of these authors highlights an insightfulness indicative of deep, considered thought. Indeed, the study of the medium is apparent in his own fiction, and it becomes easy to view Mothers as a sort of love letter to the very concept of creating and telling stories.
And, on one hand, this is true. Each story is refined to the point of pristine efficiency, so much so that one finds themselves checking if the ‘debut’ claim is some sort of mistake. Power’s pacing is expert, his language tight and concise yet still ringing with poetic beauty. The denouements range from shockingly abrupt to unnervingly flat, keeping the reader in limbo from one story to the next. All in all, everything any true lover of the form looks for in short fiction.
However, look past the craft, and Power is far more ambiguous about the relative benefit of stories. The characters in Mothers are united by a fundamental loneliness, and to various degrees embrace fiction as a defence mechanism or escape route. In some, such as the ‘Colossus of Rhodes’, characters try to save themselves through the creation of stories, and in others, like ‘The Crossing’, characters try to end stories before they can take root, or else switch the tracks to lead their story away from those around them. In others still, characters are overcome by the fictions they have created. Take for example ‘Jimmy Kingdom’, in which a stand-up comedian finds success in impersonating a now-dead legend of the genre, but loses himself beneath the semi-fictional character he has created. Or, perhaps worse, ‘Above the Wedding’, where a man weaves an entire romantic fantasy out of a drunken tryst with one half of a couple, and travels to their wedding with the hopeful/delusional understanding that the groom will confess his love for him.
The message being, no matter how they are intended, stories are not purely curative forces. People are pulled apart by the fictions they cling on to beyond reason, and others troubled by stories they are trying to forget. Or even, as with the Swedish burial site of ‘The Having Dolmen’, stories they don’t believe or even know to begin with. The will to escape loneliness might be the common cause of all these tales, but successful escape is far from the universal effect.
In the three interlinked stories titled Mother, all based at some point in the life of Eva, stories are told as a way of rationalising pain and suffering. In the first, ‘Mother 1: Summer 1976’, Eva is a girl struggling to understand the alien detachment of her mother and complete absence of her father, of which she has only ever seen in a single photograph. “I was so excited when she let me look at [the picture], but I never asked her to,” Eva narrates. “It seemed right that I shouldn’t be able to see it whenever I wanted. It needed to be earned, albeit through some mysterious process I didn’t understand”.
‘Mother 2: Innsbruck’ finds Eva in her thirties, travelling alone with a guidebook her mother had kept all those years before. Like many of the stories in the collection, Power’s realism is never quite punctured, yet is haunted by something just out of sight, a lingering sense of something more, or something worse, that might announce itself at any moment. The piece ends with a seemingly unimportant decision, though ‘Mother 3: Eva’ reveals the tragic truth. This closing story jumps ahead a few years again, told from the perspective of Eva’s husband, Joe. Eva, now a mother herself, has become an exaggerated version of her own mother, cut off from those around her and unable to properly communicate the pain she is experiencing.
With the modes of communication damaged in real life, their narration feels like Eva in ‘Mother 1’ and Joe in ‘Mother 3’ return to tales from their lives as a way to explain or make clear the burden and cost of mental illness, sharing the distance and irrationality not as some accusation or punishment but rather explanation or even apology. Things are bad, they seem to be saying, and I am distant, but here is why.
However, the cyclical nature of the three pieces, which appear to have history repeat itself by the closing lines, casts ambiguity onto the relative value of such a process, as though through trying too hard to understand and empathise, you are left open to the same evils. While offering explanation and context to otherwise cryptic events, being too eager to explain everything in light of past trauma or difficulty, to place yourself within a story, might end up being it’s own peculiar kind of fate—a self-fulfilling narrative that destroys the very person that willed it into being.
Which isn’t to say it’s all bad. The final passage of ‘Mother 3’ finds Joe reading what is essentially ‘Mother 1’, and it is hard to imagine he felt anything other than deep love for his wife in doing so. But still, what has gone on before is not changed, and Joe and Eva are not saved. In short, strong stories will always instigate some sort of reaction or change, but to assume that this alteration will always be good, or to map them on any kind of good-bad binary at all, is to underestimate the power of fiction. Yes, the characters of Chris Power attempt to use stories as an antidote to loneliness, but that’s not to say every effort is redemptive or magically healing. Indeed, sometimes it is actively counterproductive, the stories growing into new, deeper sources of loneliness that grip a soul and refuse to let go. Fiction, it turns out, is not some therapeutic balm. Rather, it is something that can help and hinder, soothe and scorch, and in doing so, be as nuanced and complicated as life itself.
Mothers is out now via Faber, and you can follow Chris Power on Twitter.