The skull beneath
Ra Page
SKIN by Tobias Hill Faber, £8.99, pp. 200 Apoet trying his hand at prose fiction is, according to most critics, like a comedi- an taking a straight role. All those forma- tive years spent honing a voice, shaping a persona and defining a relationship with the audience are impossible to shrug off. The expected result is hopeless ineptitude, according to the deep-seated critical preju- dice that writers, if not all artists, should `know their station', 'play to their strengths'.
The career of Tobias Hill should make us wary of such generalisations. Already established as a formidable voice in British poetry, his first collection of short stories is such a smooth translation of his poetic `Can you show me how to get the adult channel, son?' aptitudes, it reminds us of the surprising proximity of the two genres. To regard the short story as merely a snap-shot, a reveal- ing keyhole into an intricately composed episode, is to overlook one of its most enticing features: non-narrative structure. The development and resolution of theme and imagery, either through ironic inver- sion or logical extension, is what Hill seam- lessly grafts onto his stories, from his poetry.
In the tale, 'Hammerhead', a war veteran dreams about being stabbed to death during his conscription years — a hatefully claustrophobic period in his life — and later that day reality subverts the image: he is speared by a sand shark, during a joyfully liberating swim. In 'The Memory Man', a protagonist plagued with a photographic memory catches up with his long-lost lover, who suffers from the opposite: permanent amnesia. The tight symmetry of their psy- chological conditions cradles a haunting metaphor for shared responsibility.
Perhaps the strongest story, 'Zoo', tells of the bizarre disappearance of dead ani- mals at London Zoo, which most staff members blame on the eerie Featherman — named after the only trace he leaves. The hero of the story is Anja, a half- trained, Finnish voluntary worker; it is she who eventually traces the Featherman and, on finding his formalin-drenched mau- soleum, suddenly realises how she has done the same, metaphorically, with the skele- tons in her life.
The kind of binary fusion that occasions these tales has often been identified as intrinsic to poetic genesis, and Hill only dares break with it in the long title story, with its more complicated lattice of con- flicts. This takes a relatively simple plot about an ex-convict trying to sever his ties with the Japanese mafia by removing his membership tattoos, and sculpts it into a taut mystery by cross-cutting the gangster's past with the present notes of a police detective, obsessed with the circumstance of his disappearance. The tale is further complicated by the protagonist's internal conflict between a yearning to belong, sym- bolised by his tattoos, and a secret impulse to escape.
The success of this collection is owed largely to the considerable research sup- porting each story. Well-placed nuggets of technical and historical information anchor each of Hill's far-flung characters, from Japanese gangsters to French war veterans, Las Vegas croupiers to London zoo- keepers.
Many writers progress from poetry, through short fiction, to novel writing, like inevitable job promotions — writers as var- ied as Aldous Huxley, John Updike and Michael Ondaatje. But it is the rarer cases, like Hill, who succeed in foreign formats without losing their first loyalty, who remind us that poetry, and for that matter short stories, are very far from apprentice work.
Previous page
