Infinite Walrus

Where you have​ a girl and a looking-glass, or – in the case of one of Eley Williams’s short stories – a woman who sees her reflection in the automated glass doors of an office building that one morning won’t open for her, the ghost of Lewis Carroll is never far away. In her perplexed despair at being unable to enter her workplace, the narrator turns around and sees another woman through the window of a seafood restaurant, and this woman is waving. As the narrator crosses the street towards her she sees that the woman looks awfully like her. Closing in on her doppelgänger, she notices that the hand waving at her is capped on each finger with the head of a prawn.

It isn’t the ‘Lobster Quadrille’, but it’s close enough. As in dreams, Williams’s surrealism and sundry rabbit holes don’t need to violate the laws of physics to create distinctive, inviting worlds populated by exuberant eccentrics. A yawn, a laugh, an eye opening in the morning may provide enough of a glitch to set her stories in motion. Like poems, they start with irresistible first lines: ‘Not knowing what else to do, I send you walruses’; ‘This week, I am an editor of laughs’; ‘This had long been the dynamic between the two six-year-olds: Mark moved and Danny marvelled.’ Moderate to Poor, Occasionally Good is Williams’s second short-story collection, a follow-up to Attrib. and Other Stories (2017). In between, she published a comic novel, The Liar’s Dictionary (2020). It followed the fortunes of the fictitious Swansby’s Encyclopedic Dictionary, one of whose original 19th-century lexicographers embedded mountweazels – fake words – among its entries, which a modern lexicographer must ferret out for an updated edition. (Example: ‘Mammonsomniate [v.], to dream that money might make anything possible’.) The novel’s chapters were alphabetical – ‘A is for artful [adj.]’ – and the preface speculated on ‘the best dictionary that could ever exist for you’. Attrib. took its epigraph from Samuel Johnson’s dictionary and began with a story called ‘The Alphabet’. Williams’s muses are figura etymologica, faux amis, l’esprit de l’escalier. Language may be grounded in social reality, but it quickly asserts its own logic: ‘She then used the word sparagmos while ruffling my hair. I have not prioritised looking up that term’s meaning but I like the sound of it. We lost touch after I broke her arm that time by the river.’

In the new stories, words and zoology are preternaturally intertwined. ‘Rostrum’, the title of the story in which the woman meets her prawn-waving double, is a word meaning ‘the often spinelike anterior median prolongation of the carapace of a crustacean’. That’s its tertiary definition, after the more recognisable one – a raised stage for public speakers. The two definitions merge in etymology: ‘rostrum’, from the Latin rodere (to gnaw), referred to the beaks of captured galleys that decorated a speaker’s platform in the Roman forum.

The dictionary is a zoo, confining words in cages; but people are infinitely various and spawn words in the wild. A boy falling asleep over his homework dreams of ‘ossicones!, the little nubs on the top of a giraffe’s head’. The narrator of ‘Scrimshaw’ discovers that ‘nobody seems to have a clear idea of the etymology of walrus … A variety of walrus found in the North Pacific has sometimes received the distinct specific name obesus … Another site claims that a name given to the ivory of their tusks is morse.’ This logomania is fuelled by smartphones and search engines: ‘My phone becomes a rogues’ gallery montage of silly walrus faces standing up on wealthy white stilts; reams of them, herds of them; infinite walrus.’

Reading Williams is nothing like scrolling, however, even if some of her lines seem tweetable. (‘It is so difficult to sleep, don’t you think, when there is always something growing,’ an insomniac horticulturist remarks.) Strange bits of information are easy to come by in the age of Google, but it’s the way they pretzel the narrators’ minds that leads to surprises: ‘too-quick chicanery of thought can cause a conversational form of the bends.’ Williams’s characters are overthinking professionals who don’t conform to type: they include a courtroom sketch artist, a shipping forecast announcer, a Foley artist and an escape room worker who used to have a gig as a living statue. Nor do they have typical relationships. In ‘Message’, a marriage proposal in a restaurant goes awry in proportion to the effort put into it (skywriting is involved). The middle-aged couple in ‘Words of Affirmation’ transform their marriage after the wife overhears her husband scathingly call her ‘redoubtable’ at a party. She is initially hurt, but then spies on his browser history and discovers that he visits a porn site and searches for ‘Woman Lancashire accent speaking sternly’. That’s her. Redoubtably, our narrator decides to own her redoubtableness.

Despite that ghost of Carroll, I came late to the realisation that Williams’s comic strengths may derive from her interest in children’s literature, which she teaches; she cites Saki as a great influence – my English textbooks in primary school were rich with the works of Saki and Joan Aiken (of whom Williams is also reminiscent). The shipping forecast ‘is really just a grown-up’s bedtime story’. There’s the ‘yawning game’, with instructions, and a digression on gobstoppers; the teenage girl who fears she has a moustache and develops a fixation on St Wilgefortis; the boarding school of ‘Hare and Hounds’. It explains the moments of unnerving preoccupation with the body, with orifices, especially the one from which words emerge. Insomnia has you ‘in its jaws’. Storm clouds have ‘bruxism’. Why does aspirin ‘dissolve’ but candy ‘melt’ in the mouth? The stories are never more than a few pages long, which also gives them the feel of children’s stories: nothing is belaboured.

When they achieve pathos, it’s because they touch on mortality with a child’s innocence. ‘Squared Circle’, the tale of Salamander and Anvil Face, two former wrestlers, one dying, the other unable to visit him in hospital thanks to Covid protocols, is possibly the most stirring piece in the collection. ‘What (Not) to Do with Your Hands When You Are Nervous’, a riff on Keats’s eight-line fragment ‘This Living Hand’, is also wonderful. (Keats wrote it, the narrator reminds us, while he was also working on a failed comic poem titled ‘The Jealousies’.) The narrator is on her way to a job interview, worrying about her tendency to fidget under pressure, when she starts noticing the hands of the other passengers: ‘folded in laps, tapping along with an unseen beat, steepled, gnawed’. Her inner monologue is divided into a series of notes, as if written on index cards, to a woman she has just met and become infatuated with. The metonym of hands, passing from Keats to Tube passengers to a statue of a woman’s hand in a charity shop to the term ‘mortmain’, is a burst of romantic exuberance: ‘Hands have become wonderful and strange since I met you.’ Yet Keats’s last, unfulfilled love hangs over the future like the disembodied hand of countless horror stories.

If Keats’s metonymic hand brings the figment of the poetry fragment into the world of fiction, the book’s final piece, ‘Escape Room’, brings the short story into the domain of poetry. For what is a short story if not an escape room: ‘It could be interesting to watch how a sealed room either brought people together or rent them apart.’ And what is a room if not a stanza? ‘But of course – if your lives were full of stress and constraint, why not relax by putting yourself through an entirely fictitious new source of frustration.’ Yet the claustrophobia of the escape room (and of being trapped in your own head, mincing the world into laughs and yawns and nictitation, synonyms and etymologies and index cards) exists in counterpoint to our transience, as the shipping forecaster surmises: ‘Finisterre, which meant “end of the earth” and therefore had all the poetry you could want’.