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Perfect Lives (2011)

by Polly Samson(Favorite Author)

3.4 of 5 Votes: 1

ISBN

1860499929 (ISBN13: 9781860499920)

languge

English

genre

Fiction

publisher

Virago UK

review 1: I was lucky enough to win this book! I cast my eyes over to my tweet deck whilst i was working away and up popped a tweet from those lovely people at Virago asking a question I happen to know the answer too.. and low and behold I was the first to reply.. and a few days later this great little book popped through my letter box!So to the book itself, it is a collection of short stories by a lady called Polly Samson. I hadn't read any of her books before. Polly writes with such a wonderful descriptions, the book reminded me at times of Mrs Dalloway, the way she really described the minutia of life. It was fun to dip in and out of other peoples lives and problems through these pages. it was also nice the way she returned to some of the characters in the later stories.So all... more in all I am very pleased I won this great book!
review 2: This is the second short story collection I've read lately that was themed in some way. In Colm Toibin's "The Empty Family" the stories were linked by theme and to some extent by very similar protagonists. In this, the link is via a cast of recurring characters; not all appear in each story but they mostly live in the same town and are often related, so that your first instinct on meeting a character called Tilda in the sixth story is to scrabble back through the book muttering "who the hell was she?" until you find she was briefly mentioned as the sister of Anna, from story 2.Arguably this makes them not so much stories as episodes from an embryonic novel and I am in fact starting to think that what I like best about a collection of Chekhov stories is the variety that belongs to the genre, never knowing if I'll next meet a drunken peasant, a troubled doctor or a pair of illicit lovers on holiday. I'm not saying it can't work to have characters recur through a collection, but I do think that if you pull this trick, the recurring characters and their setting had better be very varied and interesting. In fact the setting is a rather genteel part of a seaside town and the characters are so much from the same background and class as to get a bit samey. It was especially hard to differentiate the various teenagers of each family. There is one character, who I don't think is ever named, since she tends to be a first person narrator, who does work very well in this role. She was brought up by very altruistic, politically involved and socially conscious parents, rebelled against that background and is now habitually sneering at anything and anyone remotely idealistic - if you think that makes her dislikeable, it does, but she is also a witty and amusing voice, as such people often are, and enlivens mightily the stories she narrates, like "The Man Across The River", where she is taken to Greenham Common as a child: "It might be fun to live in a bender, take the kids", Suzanne was saying, and I thought how much more fun it would be if they all dropped dead" and "Morganna", where she is passenger to the eponymous woman, who is not in a fit emotional state to be driving: "I called for her on Tuesdays and Thursdays at two-thirty in the afternoons so we had a clear hour to mow down pedestrians"."Morganna", though, suffers hugely from a complete change in viewpoint in the last few pages; suddenly we are seeing through Morganna's viewpoint not the narrator's, and though there is the odd perfunctory "she said" to establish her having told the events to the main narrator, it doesn't really come off. And here we come to my main gripe with the book. It is consistent where I don't really want it to be, ie in having this recurring cast; it is inconsistent where consistency really matters, ie in technique. For instance, there is a story, "At Arka Pana", set in Poland (I don't think it any accident that the two stories I like best are set in Hamburg and Poland, rather than Suburbia-by-the-Sea) with a really fine ending:"The people flowed past, parting like a river around the man and the girl standing apart from each other on the path talking into their mobile phones."In the context, the use of "man and "girl" is a quiet touch of brilliance (as, in "The Egg", is Celia's reference to a child as "it" rather than "she"). But this adeptness with words and structure is intermittent rather than consistent. "At Arka Pana", which ends so well, begins with a cheap and pointless narrative trick, misleading the reader as to the relationship between two people to no end at all. "The Egg" depends on the reveal of a secret and the mechanics of this are just implausible. Imagine for a moment that you are a man with a secret life, and a woman, whom you know but your wife doesn't, chances to see you in a situation you really don't want your wife to know about. I don't know about you, but common sense tells me you don't (a) invite this woman to your forthcoming party and (b) make a point of introducing her to your wife. And before you suggest that he subconsciously wants to be found out, he clearly doesn't, because some physical reactions can be faked, but going puce with embarrassment is not among them. "Leaving Hamburg", in itself a fine story, contains an attempt at describing an area of Hamburg - "wide streets that were more Belgravia than Muswell Hill". I can't begin to express how useless this is as a description, to someone who knows neither Belgravia nor Muswell Hill, nor how irritating it is that the author should assume all her readers will be au fait with such shorthand. There's also some unnecessary spelling out; in "Leaving Hamburg" I had figured why Aurelia hated tattoos before I was helpfully told.There's quite a lot of humour, verve and observation in these stories but I don't think the technique is as subtle, consistent or assured as, say, that of another observer of human relationships, Sarah Salway, in her short story collection "Leading the Dance" (Bluechrome).Comment less

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