The Tulip Garden and Other StoriesChristopher Arthur (Stamford House Publishing, 2004)Review by Adrian Barlow The Tulip Garden and Other Stories is a collection of twenty two stories. Some are set in England, often north of the Humber; others further east, Turkey and Russia. They are in a sense, a traveller's tales, and the ability to establish a sense of place is one of the strongest features of Christopher Arthur's writing. The subject of many of the stories is a search for the past, and frequently it is an image - a photograph, a painting, a newspaper cutting, for example - which prompts the search. In 'Two Pictures', perhaps the most disturbing of all the stories in the collection, a photograph shows two inmates of a concentration camp, one being forced by the camp guards to act as executioner of the other. It prompts a discovery that forces the reader to confront both a private tragedy and an historical nightmare. This discovery, only sprung on the reader in the last sentence of the story, is the more powerful because the narrative itself has been so carefully understated up to this point. Some of the stories, those with an English setting, focus on eccentrics or outsiders. Cyril Crackenthorpe, in 'The Junior Handwriting Prize', is an obsessive letter writer whose habits of exquisite handwriting and pathological neatness owe everything to the "ancient usher' Mr Elcox who once trained him in the art of calligraphy. 'Noblesse Oblige' is a nice spoof: a tale of the unexpected with a gallery of characters straight from the world of Cluedo or To the Manor Born: Lady Frobisher, the Reverend Cartwright, Belcher the gamekeeper and so on. Again, though, it is the stories that have the intrusion of history as their theme which are the most powerful. The art of the short story depends on the tale's ability to outlast its telling, and one of the shortest stories in this collection is the most compelling: 'Doodlebug' involves its first-person narrator in a double time-shift that links childhood and old age, the Second World War and modern terrorism. As with 'Two Pictures', the impact of the literal blast which is the story's climax is felt as an after-shock that sends the reader back to the text to work out how the narrative trick has been done. It is always tempting to look for literary antecedents: some of the tales belong in the classic tradition of the horror short story that goes back to WW Jacobs and 'The Monkey's Paw' or even to Edgar Alan Poe. 'Canon Allcoat', a story that involves a search for the truth behind the legend of St Cuthbert's bones, has the musty relish of MR James. The setting of this story, an old Northumbrian Peel Tower whose rotten plasterwork is stripped back to reveal a mystery and whose overgrown garden is restored to reveal a disturbing folly, is beautifully described, and suggests that Christopher Arthur feels particularly at home in this Northumbrian landscape. Equally, though, he writes powerfully about landscapes which he also knows well but where he can never be at home: post-Communist Russian cities, and the further reaches of Siberia. In 'The Icon', 'Grandpa Misha' and 'Vitali's Tale' the bowing of Holy Mother Russia's shoulders under the weight of the twentieth century's history is movingly depicted. Here, the deceptive pace and expansiveness of view belong more to the world of Turgenev's Hunter's Sketches. The tales themselves, however, are not in any way derivative and like Russian dolls contain stories within stories. The leisurely pace and gradual unfolding of 'Vitali's Tale' lead to a denouement that is both unexpected and inevitable; 'Grandpa Misha', set both the early twentieth century and in the twenty first, leaves both the hero and the reader to revise their assumptions about history. In The Tulip Garden and Other Stories it is the excavation of the story beneath the surface that gives vitality to the past, retrieving the lives of ordinary people and making them extraordinary. Copyright Adrian Barlow 2004
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Download one of his stories from here for free Noblesse Oblige (PDF 25Kb) just click on the name!
News Flash Christopher Arthur is working on a further collection
of stories which he hopes will see the light of day within twelve months.
They will develop some of the themes which he has introduced in his first
collection: The New Russia and its coming to terms with the post-communist
world; the lonely oddball at odds with his own society; the past and the
unexpected claims it makes on the present; the absurdity of existence....
Like the first collection of stories these will surprise the reader,
sometimes leading him or her up unexpected paths into supposedly blind
alleys with no apparent exits. The humour will be macabre in places, but
sympathy not entirely lacking for the characters caught up in their
strange predicaments...Above all the stories will be entertaining, each a
good late night snack before switching off the bedside light. |
 ORDER OF STORIES1. The Tulip Garden 2. Mrs McAlister 3. Grandpa Misha 4. Two Pictures 5. The Grand Tour 6. The Ikon 8. Rasputin 9. The Vandals 10. Skeleton in the Cupboard 11. Laura Wakefield 12. Doodlebug 13. Canon Allcoat 14. Hunter/Gatherers 15. The Junior Handwriting Prize 16. A Chip off the Old Block 17. Uncle Eric 18. Eyes in the Night 19. Christie 20. Corot 21. The Face 22. Vitali's Tale |
Download one of his stories, Noblesse Oblige from here for free. |
