Book review: What Becomes

Published on Thursday 30 July 2009 14:07

What Becomes by AL Kennedy Jonathan Cape, 218pp, £16.99

"WHAT BECOMES" IS A GRACEFUL title. A touch Beckettian perhaps, but let's not be picky. The broken-hearted are never far off in this collection. When you primp its 200-odd pages a lightish riffling exhales, like the ghost of something small and possibly sad. Which is very soothing as well as disturbing.

But What Becomes is not a ghost. Not even the ghost of the broken-hearted. There are laughs. The author herself is pictured smiling. She seems in the mood for celebration.

It's part of her gift. That giving and simultaneous taking. You have to read her for richer or poorer. There's even a story here called "Marriage" – the shortest story in the collection. Here's how it starts:

"This isn't working, he can tell. The fact of this not working is so very obvious that he can picture it forming a cloud, an area of staining somewhere in his brain which will be exactly the colour of failure…"

So, guess the colour? Black? Too obvious. Red? Too inflamed. Why not try – you've guessed it – a nice diarrhoea mix: acid green combined with yellow. A helping of brown? Mmn… here it comes – "Yes, there ought to be brown", no hesitation, and then: "Shit brown."

I could go on reading this stuff till the cows come home. "Shit brown". Clever, downbeat, sardonically loaded. You want to read on. Not because you're seduced by this guy whose brain is growing a bruise – he's perfectly pleasant, he could be any of us really – but rather because of the odd situation: the wife out in front of him as they stride through an unnamed town, her objective unspecified, keeping her distance. "He'd wanted to give her a splendid day, but she wouldn't listen…"

This third-person tale inhabits his senses. He is the subject – the wife objectified, marches on, and all the while the voice of the story engages our sympathy, a loading of the dice. But nothing happens, and yet it feels as if something could. And when everything changes in one terse sentence, it takes you off guard; the tilt is altered.

Kennedy uses this ploy again – the see-sawing moment – in several stories that guide you as ever into the grip of her offbeat diction: the striking absence of personal pronouns, the switching of tenses within a few sentences, the impression of verbal economy – a false one.

Kennedy's words and punctuation exist to bring rhythm as well as mood, as well as meaning to the mix.

For instance, the title tale kicks off with a man in a cinema. Through a set of flashbacks, we learn he is far from what he seems. We meet the wife. Their lives are troubled, childless, violent, stymied by loss. Their blighted past is a riven wound. Kennedy pares away the tissue in what is a brilliantly unflinching piece of writing, laying bare their separate lives and sensibilities. Both are wrong, both are right. There is no right and wrong. There is just the question: What becomes…?

In absolute contrast, the wonderful Story of My Life begins like an Ali Smith pastiche: "In this story, I'm like you." After which it is clear that the voice of the tale and the reader have, almost certainly, little in common. The growing of beaks, and visits to the dentist, a lifetime of horror (in what appears to be AL Kennedy's autobiography of dental misadventures). In part it's a masterclass in the art of keeping the reader on the prong of the writer's probing, in part a tale about growing older, the fraught misfiring of relationships, false starts. It is also laugh-out-loud funny, perfectly timed.

Across the collection a handful of sentences trip you up, their purpose and meaning too obscure. I counted five. But you're still overwhelmed by the virtuosity – the bravura and the presence in one of the stories of the perfect verb, to tweeze. Kennedy pulls out all the stops.

&#149 AL Kennedy will be appearing at the Edinburgh book festival on 17 and 21 August.