Notes from the Fog
By Ben Marcus
Granta
“The worlds in Marcus’ stories are weird reflections of our own, where science soars and people forget to touch one another”
Notes from the Fog, Ben Marcus’ new short story collection, is inhabited by characters that seem at first like ‘real’ people, but who turn out to be something a bit looser. These are stories that have an interior, bickering tone, like a party of disgruntled gremlins who have no one to talk to. They mutter, they complain, they crawl over the rubble of a ruined world and try and pick their way to something like contentment. In summary: these are not cheery tales.
Jonah, aged ten, turns to his parents one evening and says he doesn’t want to be touched or held anymore. ‘Cold Little Bird,’ the first story in the collection, is told from Jonah’s father’s perspective as he grows increasingly frustrated at his son’s sudden assertion of independence, and his apparent disregard for his parents’ needs. “You’ll die, without affection,” he tells Jonah. “I’m not kidding. You will actually dry up and die.” It is a chilling story, lit by moments of humour that seem inappropriate and dangerous, heightening the tension between the characters and driving them further into themselves. Jonah’s mother adapts much better than the father; in fact, mothers fair a lot better than fathers in Marcus’ stories.
In ‘The Boys,’ the narrator’s older sister dies, leaving a widower and two sons blinking at her absence. The narrator moves in with them and is quickly tasked with their full-time supervision. Her own grief is postponed while she tends to the helmet-wearing and sword-wielding rascals. Her narration is cautious, distant, but with sudden rushes at bare, skeletal truth, the kind of narration one expects from Marcus, who excels at this unmasking, at looking his characters long enough for their hurt to flash. When asked by the boys to talk about their mother, she says: “She came out into the world before me, and she looked around, she checked everything out, and then she whispered to me, wherever I was, that it was all clear. Everything was fine. I could come out.”
If there’s a craving every narrator in this collection shares it’s a need for intimacy, at the very least a body to sleep next to and maybe wake up to. It can be sexual or familial, or even just the knowledge that someone knows you’re there. In ‘George and Elizabeth,’ we learn of a webcam pornstar who gets paid to simply watch people doing whatever, doing nothing; as George says, “they are paying to have eye contact whenever they want.” The worlds in Marcus’ stories are weird reflections of our own, where science soars and people forget to touch one another. That is not to say there isn’t plenty of humour; in fact, there is a constant threat of hysteria growing in almost every story. Each laugh, when it comes, is edged with fear – the fear that it may be the last laugh, that it might die alone. Each story is starved, not right, and unforgettable; the reading experience, consuming. You want to touch your own face after reading this book. Or you might let someone else.
Words: John Vaughan
