Blood Knowledge by Kirsty Gunn

"A novel is a kind of lazy way of writing a short story, a short story a lazy way of writing a poem" said Muriel Spark, adding by explanation: "The longer they become, the more they seem to lose value". We might wonder then if the most value is to be found in the shortest novels, the shortest short stories and the shortest poems, such as Christian Stevens's Hummingbirds / don't know the words and Giuseppe Ungaretti's Eternal.

However, these may be still too lazy for Muriel Spark. A single word instead then? A single letter perhaps, maybe even a punctuation mark? Such logic leads to a blank page as the least lazy and most valuable form, or no page at all, or even better, the space from which the page has been removed. But perhaps Muriel Spark is only cheekily inverting the common assumption that, as a lisping Kingsley Amis might have said, more means worth. If she is, it is only its inversion: the longer a work becomes, the closer it comes to such value in the abyss of prose. Collecting poems or stories into a book draws attention to the spaces between entries that inevitably invoke a value effaced by the writing. What can the writer do?

The question creates the tension in Blood Knowledge, the story opening Pretty Ugly, Kirsty Gunn's latest collection. Venetia Alton, a writer of bestselling historical romances, reflects upon a happy marriage and two successful careers, a beautiful home and garden, with children having flown the nest to find their own happy and successful lives. She publishes a novel every two years, alhough she admits they write themselves:

It was a case of doing the research, compiling the characters, and the contents would play out in the same way with every title: Tough times into good. Happy ever after. Wars could rage in Renaissance England, French coasts beset by 19th century piracy and highland estates overcome by rebellion...but all would come right in the end because it was what happened at home that counted; it was a story after all.

She sets all this against a disquiet often expressed to Richard, her husband, as a wish to build a different life elsewhere, perhaps abroad, but dismissed by him as "silly". How could it be better than here? She cannot say, not out loud anyway. She turns instead to writing on scraps of paper and hiding them from view. The scraps work in the opposite direction to the novels as they contain evidence of a rebellion against the genre she has lived, that she has been expected to live, as a wife and mother, and as a novelist. What counts for her is the space around what is present to everyone else, a space that cannot be addressed, cannot become part of a happy ever after story. And yet of course it it has been addressed, here, in this story. Venetia's secret was made public the moment it was written down, even if it remains forever hidden in a drawer. In keeping with the oxymoron of the collection's title, writing is an open secret.

If the ostensible value here is Venetia's affirmination of her sequestered self and as such appearing to submit to a familiar genre of contemporary critical discourse – it may be no coincidence that Venetia shares a seven-letter Latinate first name with Clarissa Dalloway and that her husband is also called Richard – its native value is that it pulses with the secret of storytelling, its blood knowledge, a secret nevertheless we have to keep. 

 

Notes

1: The reader's demand for the work to efface the ambiguity of value is revealed by the reliably execrable Hadley Freeman in her review of a book "described in the press release, rather untemptingly, as a short story collection".

2: It has become a pattern that, when I write about short story collections, I write about one story only. It happened first with Thomas Bernhard's Goethe Dies, then Enrique Vila-Matas' Death by Saudade, followed by Sam Pink's Blue Victoria, and most recently Gert Hofmann's Arno. This appears to be a critical cop-out and/or implicit criticism of the other stories in the collections. Instead, however, I hope it is best to avoid the value-free impressionism I remember from reading reviews in the NME in the 1980s in which tracks of LPs were summarised with adjective-noun combinations – "the upbeat freedom of X, the trenchant melancholy of Y" – as if that helped anyone. In this case, it is a nice coincidence that I'm reviewing a book published by Rough Trade which as a music label gave us records by The Fall, The Smiths and Robert Wyatt, each of which I bought at that time and still own.