Books

Review by Francis Sheppard

As the dual title may indicate, two stories are told in this 19-page chapbook. The more they are linked, the more disturbing the experience of the reader. The first uses the traditional sequence of the little girl who wanders into a forest to encounter a wolf. The opportunity is there for devouring of course, but her fate is perhaps worse. In the dialogue between beast and child, childhood innocence is lost. The wolf succeeds in confusing the innocent mind with its flawed logic, and in undermining those benevolent adult figures who together construct the secure Eden that up to this point she has inhabited.

The second ‘fable’ in this compact piece concerns another advance into the unknown, though this time willed and deliberate. A hidebound traditional society of hunters is tempted to new sport, where the prey must itself be a predator. The condition made by the mysterious supplier is that the creature is to be killed. This the hunters can never do: it is they who are its easy victims, bitten and torn in a gratuitous frenzy of killing.

So this agent of death continues to stalk in the ground that they have blindly allotted to it. Similarly the doubt and fear let loose in the infant mind. Is this inevitable, part of the ‘human condition’ – is it something we through our weakness allow, through our obeisance to unexamined ‘norms’, through our cosy acceptance of fairytale versions of ourselves. As to the latter, the writer begins the little girl’s story in a Blytonish landscape, of primary colours. There is a complete absence of the detail that would anchor the tale in time and space.

This is true of Martin’s other fiction, certainly the as-yet unpublished Max Talks to me from the Corner of the Room. The reader may long for the reassurance of recognisable mis en scene; the world of both works is however the abstracted imagination, and the desert winds that blow there are cold. Beauty, love and freedom seem impossible here, all destroyed by William Blake’s burrowing worm. Oh Rose, Thou Art Sick… The narrator of Max does however discover that not only he, but also the petulant voice within him – can be known by another human being. And so to the transformation of the world, both inner and outer.