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Wendy Perriam |
Art of epiphanies and small miracles
LITTLE MARVEL AND OTHER STORIES
By Wendy Perriam. Robert Hale £18.99
WENDY Perriam is busy researching her next book of stories at the moment.
One of them will involve naked swimming in Hampstead ponds. Her last collection, The Biggest Female in the World, was launched at a giant picnic on the Heath and her 14th novel, Second Skin was largely set in Camden Market.
There are no obvious Camden settings in this latest collection of stories but the wit and sharpness of eye that led one reviewer to describe her as “one of the finest and funniest writers to emerge in England since Kingsley Amis” are still triumphantly there.
Nearly all her central characters are lonely or in some kind of crisis but manage through determination or sense of humour, or sheer bloody-mindedness to come through.
Here, for example, is middle-aged Alice, released by the death of an eccentric and difficult aunt, into an act of generosity and reconciliation; or directionless Lynn, house-sitting for a friend, suddenly compelled to take in some homeless strangers; or 90-year-old Frieda, resenting her loss of independence and the party-games at the day centre, drawn back through family memories to a new sense of optimism and hope.
Even the defeated characters show a kind of stoic acceptance which is both touching and oddly encouraging. When sandy-haired credit controller Brian, just back from a conference in Italy and the one experience of sexual passion in his timid life, is led meekly towards his 40th birthday celebration by his dowdy wife and unattractive children, the feeling is one of victory rather than defeat. Life is not simply a matter of sexual fulfilment or the approval of your neighbours, or social success, nice as all those things might be. “Only accept” to paraphrase EM Forster.
Happiness, you feel, in all Perriam’s work, is hard to come by. Certainly not to be expected. But epiphanies, small miracles and revelations are always possible.
In the last story of this collection, 20-year-old Natasha, slightly embarrassed and out-of-place on a residential creative writing course, sees in the magnificent early morning display of a garden peacock, a way of going forward in her life and as an author: “...as she began to write swiftly and – yes, spontaneously – the first chapter of a flamboyant peacock’s tale.”
Piers Plowright
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