Book Review : An Old-Fashioned English Storyteller

Doing the Voices by Jeremy Brooks (Viking/Salamander: $14.95)

The lives in these four stories by Jeremy Brooks have shapes. They are made of material firm enough so that when something happens to them a mark is left or, if the force is considerable, they change direction.

It may strike us as a rather old-fashioned notion. Many of our short stories now are not about shapes but shapelessness. They deal with the way we feel or think we feel, and seem to fit us like a glove. On the other hand--since, if you have no shape, you can’t change into another shape--they lack drama. Perhaps they also lack instruction. With the better ones, you won’t end up saying “So what?” but neither, probably, will you say “Oh, so.”

A Real Change

“Doing the Voices” puts us back in the more traditional kind of story, which is essentially a hinge; a moment where a mood, or a sensibility, or a life alter with an all but audible clink. Hinges or joints only have meaning if what they join is sufficiently formed so that the change of angle is a real change. You don’t put a hinge in a banana or foam rubber.

I may have done Brooks a damage by using the word traditional. And I will risk another possible damage by reporting that not only do his lives have shapes but that, in three of the stories, anyway, these shapes involve what might be called a happy ending, or at least a growth in stature.

Yet don’t conclude that this very gifted Englishman is some kind of throwback to O. Henry or Saki or the Saturday Evening Post. Every detail, character and speech in these stories is biting and fresh. If Brooks’ philosophy as a storyteller is not exactly contemporary, it is not retrograde, either. I think it is a matter of being wise out of his time.

“I’ll Fight You” is set in a Welsh seaside town during World War II’s early days, when Britain was preparing to resist a feared German invasion. A group of teen-age boys, imitating their elders, has been preparing their own resistance. Under the leadership of the bossy and flamboyant Epsom, they have been stealing supplies, tools and ammunition, and hiding them in a hut up in the hills.

Their latest operation, a raid for flashlights on a local store, conducted with military precision, coincides with a countertheme. Smith, the narrator, a supercilious type whose attitude toward life is to participate and withdraw at the same time, is conducting an advance--and--retreat operation with his girlfriend, Kathy. He is challenged by Dewi, a smaller, crippled boy who, with frightening passion, offers to fight him for her.

With the traditional English ability to create adult battles in a childish microcosm (“Lord of the Flies,” “A High Wind in Jamaica” and, for that matter, “The Wind in the Willows”), Brooks makes his youngsters and their maneuvers serious, touching and funny at the same time. And having drawn us into this world, he gives it a half-turn to stunning effect.

Epsom, the young general of an imaginary war, finds himself suddenly in the real war threatened by Dewi. Instinctively, he tells him not to be silly: “Either he wins or you win, and what does that prove? Only that he’s stronger than you, or you’re cleverer than him. It doesn’t make one right and the other wrong.”

The Biggest Transformation

Dewi ignores it. Smith, challenged, suddenly realizes he wants Kathy after all. But the biggest transformation is in Epsom, who suddenly perceives what he has been saying; and from that moment, begins an internal trek that will one day make him a militant pacifist.

This could be pat and stagy, but it isn’t. Brooks handles life with such delicacy and precision that conversion is as natural as love or lunch. Epsom’s words have crystallized something for him; they lead to change.

In all these four stories, in different ways, Brooks’ conviction that words count give his characters’ speech and thoughts, for all their naturalness, a winged power. His dialogue is kinetic, not simply descriptive. We are inveigled by his charm and his ability to tell a story; once inveigled, we are held by his urgency.

In “Wrong Play,” the urgency shows when a tentative, playful romance between a photographer and an actress is transformed by the man’s realization of his lover’s fundamental seriousness, and by his suddenly-discovered ability to face his own. The moment of change, quite magically, comes with their visit to a tiny provincial circus run by a valiant but failing mother and son.

Savage and Comic Portrait

In the title story, “Doing the Voices,” Brooks constructs a savage and comic portrait of a businessman who uses his wealth to set himself up as a local squire, complete with baronial hall, devoted servants, a gamekeeper and a steward. But they are all fakes, of one kind or other. The gamekeeper is a Cockney ex-convict who has studied up on bird books, the steward is a dilettante who used to work in a fairground, and the lady’s maid is trying to write a novel. Again, it is a phrase or two that precipitates matters and that allows the “steward” and the “maid” to end their own play-acting and go on to something more real. The story is a comedy, a wry romance and an accomplished satire on the wider play-acting aspects of contemporary Britain.

Brooks, who works in the English theater, has written two novels as well as these stories. He is extremely good; he does not seem to be prolific. If he were, he could become an addiction.