BROKEN VOICES
Broken Things by Padrika Tarrant
Reviewed by Sarah Bower
Padrika Tarrant is a familiar face to regulars at Norwich’s Cafe Writers evenings. I almost wrote, a familiar voice, but that would have been misleading. Because, as this first collection of stories proves, there is nothing familiar about her voice at all.
Tarrant’s fictional world exists somewhere just under the skin of the quotidian ‘every day’ world, in a space of which most of us are unaware most of the time and are thankful for it. On one level, her writing is firmly grounded in place; particular cities and even the streets in them are often mentioned by name, though Tarrant does not have to make explicit references for us to know where we are – in sad bedsits and bleak council flats, in charismatic churches where fear of the devil holds greater sway than the love of god, on late night buses and empty underpasses and streets where dead dogs lie in gutters and dead souls pass unnoticed.
Yet Tarrant does not see these places with the same eyes as we do. Her storytelling strips away the mundane to reveal, with scalpel-like precision and great compassion, what lies beneath. In stories such as Darling and Coffinwood, the dead are not gone, but merely waiting to reveal themselves to those who take time to care for them, to inflate their lungs with old carrier bags or coax their shy presences with saucers of milk. In Gas we are confronted by the mundane and catastrophic consequences of being turned upon by what we believe we have tamed. It is one of our conceits as the only species possessed of self-awareness to personify the inanimate, and Tarrant is not afraid to take this to its logical and chilling conclusion, to show us just where our arrogance will get us.
Broken Things is a very fine collection indeed, funny, terrifying and provocative. Padrika Tarrant’s imagination is not a comfortable place to be, but it is darkly addictive, like a switchback ride or an hallucinogenic fix, and you will come away from it changed. These are simply some of the best short stories I have ever read.
Broken Things is published by Salt at £12.99 (Hardback, ISBN: 978-1-84471-343-1)
• Sarah Bower is a novelist, short story writer and teacher of creative writing. She was the winner of the 2005 Cafe Writers Short Fiction Award. Her first novel, The Needle in the Blood, was published by Snowbooks in 2007 and was Susan Hill’s Novel of the Year 2007. Her second, The Book of Love, comes out in April 2008.
