Children’s Children
Jan Carson
[Liberties Press]
Jan Carson’s Children’s Children is a collection of incredibly finely crafted short stories. Following Carson’s 2014 debut novel, Malcolm Orange Disappears, Children’s Children is a remarkably self-assured collection that shows a keen eye for social nuance and razor-sharp skill with language. Set in Carson’s native County Antrim, the stories veer between the prosaic and the surreal, and sometimes that boundary becomes blurred.
In the opening story, ‘Larger Ladies’, for example, we follow Polish-born single mother Sonja’s night shifts monitoring Belfast’s overweight women as they undergo a peculiar, sedated form of weight loss treatment. Carson slowly reveals Sonja’s turbulent past with her ex-partner, her relationship with her son and her feelings about living in Belfast, away from her home and family. As in each of Carson’s stories, the fundamental sentiment driving the protagonist underlies the entire story; Sonja feels guilty for depriving her son of a father figure.
Other stories feature such protagonists as a human statue, a girl whose brother is allergic to people and a twin in mourning. Even the less unusual characters are to some degree dysfunctional. Familial grief and broken down relationships are the threads that connect the stories, and Carson often punctures the bizarre world her characters inhabit to create moments of sublime emotion. Children’s Children creates a world of strange characters and circumstances, which becomes disturbingly recognisable.
Words: Anna-Grace Scullion
