Books
The world at a strange tilt
by Mark Peters
Normal behaviour is suspended in Lloyd Jones’ career-spanning short stories.
A virtually translucent shirt hanging from a washing line is a most appropriate cover image for Lloyd Jones’ career-spanning short-story collection, The Man in the Shed. The startling shape of the garment suggests both absence and presence, motifs central to each of the 13 finely crafted stories. In the opening piece, the figure known to the young narrator only as the man in the shed turns up unannounced one day and is accommodated by the boy’s family. The man in the shed is seen but rarely heard, but a relationship inexorably develops between the newcomer and the boy’s mother. An excruciating tension builds as the father never addresses the matter, nor speaks much at all, but tries to put himself between his wife and the man. By the time the boy witnesses his pregnant mum being reeled in from the sea at the end of a fishing line, a surrealistic element has crept into the story, a stylistic thread that runs through the entire collection.
“The world has a strange tilt to it these days,” observes a character in a later story, and it’s in tilting the world slightly that Jones excels in this collection. His settings allow surreal moments to unfold as normal behaviour is suspended. On a night train in Russia, a New Zealander and his wife are prompted to rediscover their ardour for one another; a skating rink in Who’s That Dancing with My Mother? provides an emotionally if not sexually liberating arena for a neglected housewife; there is a park in which a man and his dog encounter a Polish amputee and her dog at night. And then there is the sea, the ultimate symbol of the unconscious. “The world we cannot see,” says a narrator about jellyfish dotted along the shore, “has heaped clues in a neat line along the high-tide mark.”
Peeling back the lid of contemporary New Zealand, Jones reveals through his characters a collective neurosis, a sense of estrangement and a craving for escape that seems to have its roots in an earlier, more repressive era. When suburban housewife Jude sees her neighbours prepare for a spot of tree-planting, family history might well be repeating itself as she experiences pangs of isolation and emptiness. There is the suggestion, in the lightest of touches, that Jude’s smirking husband, Tom, isn’t unlike Jude’s “self-centred pig” of a father who plundered various exotics from around the world to create the private tropical garden she so loathes.
What at first seems like neighbour-envy ends with an unexpected sense not only of liberation from suffocation by suburbia but also of belonging. If it weren’t for the neat symmetry of the stories topping and tailing the collection, this would have been a fine piece to end on.
The final story of the collection resonates with the first as the nebulous figure of an interloper becomes even more tenuous when Neil of Wairarapa is cuckolded by an imaginary man in an imaginary Russia. As the oneiric encounters with the Russian intensify, Neil’s wife’s becomes more and more absent from her husband’s life. Turning to the narrator for help, Neil creates an imaginary world that meshes with his wife’s. The story within a story within a story is a convoluted and perilous device but is handled so skilfully that it never once loses its clarity.
Jones takes huge risks in this collection, but each piece crackles with originality, startling images and lucidity. However, although the language throughout gives off much light, many of the stories generate little warmth. There is considerable verve but the language is controlled almost to the point where craftsmanship ends and bloodlessness begins. On the other hand, it’s what Jones leaves out that takes root in the mind, stays there and reveals even deeper subtleties on rereading.
