Book review: We Are Attempting To Survive Our Time, by AL Kennedy

I would not normally comment on the design of a book, but even the cover conveys this. It is vermilion red, like blood, and artfully fractured – it could be smashed glass, or crumpled paper, or even scars. It says “we are broken” and yet the lettering, nudging out into a white border, implies a kind of transcendence. The 13 stories are a masterclass in the possibilities of the short story form; comical, plangent, some fixed on the single moment, others like concentrated novels. The “We” of the title shows a slight alteration in her style. It is now not atomised individuals but a tentative collective. 

The opening story, “Panic Attack”, sets both the tenor and some of the narrative strategies of the whole. The narrator is Ronnie, and he is in King’s Cross Station. The reader is immediately unsettled by the opening words, and the fact they are in italics: “You can’t even touch a woman, not in the slightest. You cannot.” It sets up an air of foreboding. When he sees a woman in clear distress, the reader fears for the worst. The story very cleverly moves between the italicised internal narration and the outside action and dialogue, and the more we hear Ronnie’s rants at “bastards” and “dickblisters”, the more the reader is inside the very panic attack of the title. Ronnie “doesn’t run to fat, but he doesn’t precisely run to muscle, either”. 

He decides to help the woman get on the train; and then Kennedy pulls the twist. Yes, the woman is upset; yes, Ronnie’s internal monologue is full of suppressed rage. But the actual attack is Ronnie’s, elided with notes on a childhood which might have led to both his desperate kindness and desperation. It also showcases Kennedy’s precision, often with slightly unusual word choice. At the end we read that “his breath is helpless” and “the walls are peeling in at him and the floor is turning nasty”. Throughout this collection, the unexpected word is deployed with unobtrusive flair. It is also a story, like many here, which wrong-foots the reader. The opening menace morphs into realising that we have misjudged. It is the signature empathy of the book. 

What do we do in times of crisis? The story “Spider” seems to have a kind of manifesto. It is a creepy, almost gothic tale, where a woman finds that the “Gravel Man” is putting stones and bags of dog faeces on her doorstep, as well as writing nasty poison pen letters, full of free-range bigotry. But the ending is judderingly optimistic. “Let’s switch all the lamps on, shall we?”, she says to her children, “Let’s make the whole of the house shine so that everyone can see us being happy when the dark comes. We won’t close the curtains and they’ll all look and know that we’re happy…  

When the dark has come, they’ll know that we are here”. There is a clenched bravery in many of the stories, from the woman who loses patience with a bigot in a zoo (although there is a hidden backstory to her flare of anger), to the refugee who thinks: “It will be terrible, this surviving.” 

Kennedy won the Costa Book of the Year Prize for her novel Day, about a post-traumatic Second World War pilot. It is noticeable that some of the longer pieces return to warfare and anxiety. “Unanswered” is particularly good, featuring a boy who knows if his home is on a former bomb-site. “The homes that you will make will be all tangled up in these rags and embers of previous life. They’ll most often be the kind of wrong place you’ll offer to the poor.” But again there is a cunningly hidden twist – not in the Roald Dahl Tales Of The Unexpected sense, but a shift in perspective that brings to the story an awful clarity.  

Likewise, “Even Words Have Meaning” is narrated by a war correspondent, reflecting on his time in North Africa and Italy. There is a political urgency in his realisation that “We died filthily to end the filthiness, or else avoided dying and lived on filthily.” (Filth, along with Death, is one of the most frequent words in these stories, yet they somehow manage to assert, defiantly, that “people do their best” and although “Death’s a part of everybody’s mechanism, inside and ticking away. That’s why there’s got to be a lot of kindness”). 

This moral empathy extends even to those who are despised. One character, thinking of a politician who has capitalised on cruelty and now lives in luxury, says: “A prison that you’re proud of still keeps you locked up.” The ways in which selfishness is a kind of self-isolation, and extending a hand is the beginning of moral consciousness suffuses this book. Words indeed for our times.   

We Are Attempting To Survive Our Time, by AL Kennedy, Jonathan Cape, £16.99