There’s a face I found myself making again and again when reading Peter Bradshaw’s short stories, and it was not pretty: top half screwed up in incredulity; lower half slack with bovine confusion. What, my expression said, just happened?
What indeed? Bradshaw is best known as the Guardian’s chief cinema critic, but this isn’t his first foray into fiction. The collection comes in the wake of three novels; but he’s admitted that ‘the short story form has always obsessed me’. That fascination with the form has given him the confidence to play with it, and us, and my confusion was deftly engineered from the start. In the opening story ‘The Kiss’, boy meets girl in a Hendon pub in 1951. Then what? Nothing really. It’s a compellingly gruesome nothing, but the rug feels sharply pulled from under your plodding expectation of exposition, climax and resolution.
It’s not that there’s no pay-off in these funny, improbable vignettes. There are indeed moments of realisation, or dénouement, but they’re truncated, subverted or blink-and-you-miss-it casual. Some stories are marginally more conventional than others. ‘Loyalty’ (the longest and last, set in a Piccadilly coffee shop), and ‘Career Move’ (in which Satan, who looks ‘like a Canadian academic’, makes a violent pact with a playwright) come closest to offering a beginning, middle and twisted end. But others are all twist, no story. ‘Srsly’ is genuinely one of the weirdest things I’ve ever read (and I’ve been in regular correspondence with the Belgian tax authorities since 2007). I don’t know how to explain it other than to say it starts with an east London content-streaming company employee making an obscene gesture at a work rival’s Twitter post and ends with childbirth in feudal Japan, all within six pages.
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