The book’s long sentences, its penchant for the exhaustive, can at times be challenging, and there were stretches where I found its uncanny energies stagnated for too long. But it also seems clear to me that these insistent strategies are in service of the book’s mood of total claustrophobia, and that they contribute to, rather than diminish, its overall effectiveness. As with so much of the national tradition from which she emerges—Synge, Joyce, Beckett, O’Brien, the whole collectible beer-mat set of the overwhelmingly male canon, few of whom get hassled for being insufficiently snappy—Burns seems to convey through her style a deep ambivalence about the English language itself. Because it would be strange, would it not, to write a book about a community for whom every conceivable aspect of the “country over the water” was an object of obsessive and justified suspicion, and to write it in the language violently imposed on one’s people by that colonizing nation, and yet to do so in a manner that did not convey that there was something uncanny, something essentially off, about that language as the community’s primary means of self-expression?
After dad died, trying to be useful, we looked through his office. ‘Office’ is underselling it – there was so much equipment that it could equally qualify as a workshop or even a lab. It had the special kind of ordely chaos of a place filled with a thousand incredibly specific things, meticulously organised by type, when you don’t know any of the types.
I opened a tiny drawer. Ah yes, this is where he kept things that were brass, cylindrical, and slightly ridged. I closed the drawer, my task complete.
On his desk, though, I saw something I did recognise. Something I knew it would be my responsibility to adopt, decipher, and operate. I don’t know if he ever gave it a name, so I will now: it’s the Egg Controller.
To speak back—to speak “up” and “out”—is often considered the strongest form of resistance to repression and censorship. But how to speak of—speak back to—that which is created “inside the world of parting” as Kim says of Autobiography of Death—that which exists in the gaps—the gutter—between language, between violence, between death? “It feels very normal for poems to be ‘inspected,’ ‘looked at,’ ‘examined’ ‘investigated,’ ‘explored,’ and even ‘interrogated,’’ write Jo Walton and Ed Luker in Poetry and Secrecy. “Even more than this, the whole practice of literary criticism tends to organise itself around the inspectability of its objects, and the necessary alignment of scrutiny and knowledge.” Whether intentional or not, much of current review culture presents reviewers not as readers, but as elevators of reading—subscribing to the idea of objective, universal interpretation and a prescriptive approach to reading. We are afforded our own subjectivities in writing, but not, it seems, in how we approach the writing of others in public, in print.
But then the casualness of this collection is one of its attractions. It doesn’t strain after anything. It doesn’t have airs; and if it could speak, it would likely charmingly admit to its own imperfections. A mixture of depth and diversion, it makes you wish that, like a reliable band, Gabbert might publish a similar slender volume every year or two.
In a murder tale, comedy of manners, or virtually any other kind of longform story, the key is making the reader care about the characters. Anyone who’s ever tried the form can attest that such engagement is hardly automatic. Characters tend to want to be boring, unlikable, or irrelevant. There are a million ways things can go wrong. Further, one could argue that with digital technology saturating our attentions and redefining our level of patience with words, it gets harder and harder for readers to open themselves to fictional characters. That’s what makes Braithwaite’s accomplishment so special. She combines the comparatively lighter tropes of Jane Austen with a dark tale of murder, familial complication, and moral compromise, and thereby redefines both tropes for a new generation. The reader doesn’t need to concern herself with what kind of novel she’s reading. She’s too busy being engaged to notice.