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Dead Men Talking: Stories
from East Anglia Vol III. Foreword by D.J.Taylor
Dead Men Talking: Stories from East Anglia Vol III.
Foreword by D.J.Taylor - 2007 - Hardback - 288pp - 155 x 233mm
- Price £14.95 - ISBN 978-0-9549286-2-9
25 stories from some of the best fiction writers including Margery
Allingham, Elspeth Barker, Nicola Barker, Ronald Blythe, Elizabeth
Bowen, Angela Carter, Charles Dickens, George Ewart Evans, Nicci
French, Susan Hill, Philip Hensher, M R James, Chafer Legge, Toby
Litt, Mary Mann, Edna O'Brien, Clive Sinclair, D J Taylor, Sylvia
Townsend Warner, Rose Tremain, Virginia Woolf.
As D J Taylor argues in his foreword to this latest anthology
from Black Dog Books, "eveywhere from the Suffolk back-lanes
to the Norfolk flats, there is the unignorable influence of landscape."
Long before the emergence of UEA's creative writing course the
"brooding heaths, murky sea shores, low,desolate hills"
of the region were stirring the ghostly imagination of M R James,
and Margery Allingham on the Essex marshes. But this taste for
the macabre has its roots in a more distant past; in the Fenland
tales of storytellers like Chafer Legge collected by W H Barrett
in the early 1900s. "The ominous self-containment of the
Fens" has had a powerful, almost hypnotic, effect on writers
ever since on Sylvia Townsend Warner's 'Poison' and the
early Angela Carter story reproduced here while Elspeth Barker
has retrievedanother tragi-comic tale from north Norfolk's crumbling
cliffline.
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the third and final collection is, according to Taylor, "a
demonstration of what, even now, is East Anglia's 'otherness'
a separationfrom the mass cultural dustbin which ... it seems
vitally important to preserve." But for how much longer,
in the relentless clamour for yet more houses, retail parks
and road schemes, will this "otherness" survive,
and will its demise spell the end of a distinctive literary
tradition in the region? Some will point to the success of
Graham Swift's Waterland but, 25 years on, it remains a glorious
exception. Although it neatly refutes the argument that a
novelist need live in the region he/she is inspired to writeabout,
the continued presence in East Anglia of Rose Tremain, Elspeth
Barker, Ronald Blythe and D J Taylor among others is equally
persuasive. The distinctive voice of the old rural culture
that George Ewart Evans chronicled in the 1950s and that nurtured
Mary Mann's remarkable stories has been drowned out by a ubiquitous
esturine whine and the media set decanting to the coast where
soaring house prices have driven out the real-life descendents
of Mann's Wolf-Charlie and Evans' Acky Flatt. Here the marshes
have been tamed and charted for a London elite fed a diet
of lightweight novels with a salty tang. Any serious literary
response to the region's landscape is now either one of dislocation
(Philip Hensher's 'In The Net'), pollution (Toby Litt's 'New
Puritans') or brief encounters with disturbed locals (Elizabeth
Bowen's 'Look At All Those Roses' and Warner's 'A Stranger
With a Bag'). Despite the frisson of another story set in
Blakeney or Walberswick many of today's tales are so lightly
tethered to place they could be set almost anywhere, a distant
cry from the days of Chafer Legge. |
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