A Personal Anthology, by Brandon Robshaw
‘The Terrible Magician’ by Richmal Crompton
This story appears in the collection William the Outlaw (the seventh William book) and it is the first story at which I ever laughed aloud. I was eight years old at the time. I was already a committed William fan, and no doubt prior to this I had grinned or chuckled at William stories and, as was my habit at the time, repeated favourite lines or passages to myself under my breath. But this was the first time I had burst out into loud, uncontrollable laughter, to the extent that my dad put his head round the living-room door and asked what on earth was so hilarious.
The story makes me laugh even today. William and his friends the Outlaws suspect that an eccentric amateur chemist who has moved into the village is in fact an evil magician, having seen him concocting potions and muttering to himself through the window of his laboratory. They steal into the lab to investigate while he is out resting in a neighbouring field, reading a book under a tree. William and his friends optimistically try out a spell of their own: standing in a ring of test-tubes they chant ‘Turn into a donkey, turn into a donkey, turn into a donkey, Mr Magician!’
‘And now,’ writes Richmal Crompton in one of my favourite sentences in all literature, ‘comes one of those coincidences without which both life and the art of the novelist would be so barren.’
The ‘magician’ has left the field in a hurry, remembering he has a train to catch. And meanwhile the donkey of a local farmer has been let into the field. The only patch of shade is under the tree, where the magician’s book is still lying open – so that when the Outlaws look out into the field they see a donkey settled under the tree, apparently reading...
That is when I laughed. And carried on laughing. For the story gets funnier and funnier. Having created a farcical misunderstanding, Crompton’s instinct is always to add another misunderstanding and then another, to pile on the consequences, make it ever more complicated, ever more ridiculous, ever more farcical.
‘The Nine Billion Names of God’ by Arthur C. Clarke (First published in Star Science Fiction Stories No. 1, Ballantine Books, 1953)
Two American technicians are asked to install an Automatic Sequence Computer (Mark V) at a Tibetan monastery. The story was written and is set in the 1950s, when computers were massive, unwieldy beasts, so getting all the components up to a monastery two thousand feet up in the mountains of Tibet, putting them together and programming and maintaining the computer is a big job, which takes the engineers, George and Chuck, three months. But why would monks need a computer? Because they want to programme it to run through all the possible nine-letter names of God in an alphabet of their own devising (never mind how they know that the name must be nine letters, or that their alphabet is the right one; they just do). Without the computer the task would have taken them fifteen thousand years; with it, all possibilities can be exhausted within a hundred days...
I read this story when I was around twelve or thirteen, and just getting into science fiction. The ending of the story gave me, in its purest form, the sense of wonderwhich the best science fiction aims at. And although it’s written in a fairly workmanlike prose style for the most part, the very last line is so beautiful that it ought to be in a poem.
‘The Bottle Imp’ by Robert Louis Stevenson (first published in the New York Herald, February–March 1891. Collected in Island Nights' Entertainments, 1893 and widely since then. Available online here)
I first came across this, I think, in a Stevenson collection of which the title story was ‘Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’; but it was ‘The Bottle Imp’ made the stronger impression on me. Stevenson wrote it towards the end of his career (and life) when he lived in Samoa, and it is written in a plain, simple style, the style of a fable, quite different from his usual graceful but rather ornate prose. Keawe, a poor native of Hawaii, spends forty-nine dollars on a magic bottle, inside which dwells a wish-granting imp. The drawback is that if one is still in possession of the bottle at the time of one’s death, one goes straight to hell: no questions asked, do not pass Go. The trick, then, is to get what one can out of the imp and then sell the bottle on (we are told that Napoleon once possessed it, but sold it before Waterloo, and so his luck ran out). But – here is the diabolical truly bit – the bottle must always be sold for less than one bought it. Which obviously means it gets progressively harder to offload...
The best way to convey the unique flavour of the story is to quote it. This part comes when Keawe’s friend has agreed to buy the bottle from him, but first wants to take a look at the imp inside:
Now as soon as that was said, the imp looked out of the bottle, and in again, swift as a lizard; and there sat Keawe and Lopaka, turned to stone. The night had quite come, before either found a thought to say or a voice to say it with’.
Interesting footnote: the natives of Samoa thought that Stevenson himself must own such a bottle, because they couldn’t understand how he had such a big house and so much money when he never seemed to do any proper work.
‘A Bit of Luck for Mabel’ by PG Wodehouse (first published in the The Saturday Evening Post, December 26, 1925. Collected in Eggs, Beans and Crumpets, Herbert Jenkins, 1940 and widely since.)
I started reading Wodehouse in my teens and have never stopped. The genre of stories he wrote appears, sadly, to have gone out of fashion: the playful, witty, well-crafted farce with no designs other than to entertain the reader. Wodehouse, of course, excelled at it, and displayed his mastery of the form over a whole range of stories, featuring Jeeves and Wooster, the Blandings Castle personnel and the various Eggs, Beans and Crumpets of the Drones club – but his Ukridge stories are perhaps less well-known. Stanley Featherstonehaugh Ukridge is a penniless entrepreneur, a drifter, gambler, chancer and incurable optimist, always on the verge of making millions (at a conservative estimate) but constantly thwarted through other people’s lamentable lack of vision and the big, broad, flexible outlook. ‘A Bit of Luck for Mabel’ is a ridiculous comedy about Ukridge’s pursuit of the interdependent goals of love, wealth and a top hat where everything, including the last line, clicks into place as satisfyingly as the completion of a Rubik’s Cube.
Incidentally, it is another Ukridge story, ‘The Debut of Battling Billson’, that contains my favourite line in all Wodehouse: ‘Todd Bingham has as much chance as a one-armed blind man in a dark cellar trying to push half a pound of melted butter into a wildcat’s ear with a red-hot needle’.
‘Cadi Hughes’ by Glyn Jones (first published in Welsh Tales of Terror, Fontana, 1973. Collected in his Collected Stories, University of Wales Press, 1999)
One of the great literary pleasures is reading a really, really good ghost story. No other literary form supplies quite that frisson. The ghost story I have chosen – although it is not exactly a ghost story, more of an uncanny tale, or what Robert Aickman called a ‘strange story’ - is ‘Cadi Hughes’, by Glyn Jones. I encountered it in a collection called Welsh Tales of Terror. Unfortunately I no longer possess it, so in what follows I quote from memory. But it has an opening that would be hard to forget: ‘Upstairs in Number 1 Colliers Row, Ivan Hughes was dying by inches. People often say “dying by inches” without really meaning it, but in Ifan’s case it was literally true, for his left leg was gangrenous to the knee...’ Ifan is nursed by his bossy, controlling wife Cadi – and then one day there is a knock at the door, and God arrives. God doesn’t look quite as you might expect, having only leg and an outcrop of boils on one side of his face; but they both know him all right. A wonderfully grotesque, macabre story. I must get hold of another copy of Welsh Tales of Terror so I can read it again. Or, better, I think I’ll get Glyn Jones’ Collected Stories.
‘The Black Monk’ by Anton Chekhov (first published in The Artist, 1894. Now widely collected and available online here)
Andrey Vassilitch Kovrin, an university academic who lectures in Psychology, is suffering from nervous exhaustion, and is advised by a doctor friend to spend the summer recuperating away from the city. As chance would have it, his friend Tanya Pesotsky invites him to come and stay with her and her father at their country house in Borissovka. While there he continues to work at his books but also enjoys the pleasures of wine, conversation, cigars and music, and begins to fall in love with Tanya. One night, out on the balcony Kovrin tells Tanya about a peculiar legend he has remembered:
‘A thousand years ago a monk, dressed in black, wandered about the desert, somewhere in Syria or Arabia. . . . Some miles from where he was, some fisherman saw another black monk, who was moving slowly over the surface of a lake. This second monk was a mirage. Now forget all the laws of optics, which the legend does not recognise, and listen to the rest. From that mirage there was cast another mirage, then from that other a third, so that the image of the black monk began to be repeated endlessly from one layer of the atmosphere to another. So that he was seen at one time in Africa, at another in Spain, then in Italy, then in the Far North. . . . Then he passed out of the atmosphere of the earth, and now he is wandering all over the universe...’
Tanya thinks the legend creepy and goes back indoors. Kovrin wanders through the grounds and almost immediately spies the black monk gliding over the lake. ‘So it’s true,’ he thinks, without any especial surprise. Shortly after that he meets and talks with the monk; his first question, endearingly, is ‘Do you like me?’ The Monk obligingly replies: ‘Yes, you are one of those few who are justly called the Chosen of God’...
Kovrin, we realise, is not well. Yet he certainly feels well. He feels totally ecstatic. The encounter with the monk has flattered not just his vanity but his whole soul, his whole being – and radiant with joy, he immediately asks Tanya to marry him...
This wonderfully odd story, though it has brilliant comic moments, is ultimately poignant, suffused with typical Chekhovian understanding and compassion for the creatures of ‘warm blood and nerves’ that we are.
‘The Distant Past’ by William Trevor (Poolbeg Press, 1979)
Like Chekhov, William Trevor had the gift of compressing a whole life, with all its sorrows and sufferings, into the space of a few pages. I could have chosen almost any of his deep, wistful stories but for some reason this one sprang to mind. The Middletons, a Protestant couple loyal to the British Crown but still living in the Republic of Ireland, are tolerated and befriended by the Roman Catholic locals for many decades: the local butcher, who occupied their house in the 1920s, armed with a shotgun and waiting to ambush British soldiers, now bids them a cheery good morning and gives them mince for their dog. All that strife – the Easter Rising and Partition – is safely in the distant past. But then, in the 1960s, the Trouble start in Northern Ireland. Suddenly the past does not seem quite so distant. This is evidenced by small, telling details: ‘One day Canon Cotter looked the other way when he saw the Middletons’ car coming and they noticed this movement of his head, although he hadn’t wished them to’. The story embodies one of Trevor’s favourite themes, the ineluctable shaping of the present by the past. Also typically for Trevor, he does not kill off the Middletons. The characters in Trevor’s stories hardly ever die. Their task is to endure.
‘A Small Good Thing’ by Raymond Carver (first published in Cathedral, Knopf, 1983. Most recent edition is Vintage Classics, 2009)
This seems to me a masterclass in how to write a short story. Death, grief, loneliness, and the possibility of (essential but inadequate) consolation from fellow-humans, conveyed through three characters in two settings (hospital and bakery), in the space of twenty-five pages. I love Carver’s plain, stripped-down style.
‘The Ballad of the Sad Cafe’ by Carson McCullers (First published by Houghton Mifflin, 1951)
This is a novella, really, but it appears as the title story in a collection of short stories so I think it counts. It must be one of the most unusual love-triangle stories ever written, and contains one of the most unusual fight-scenes too. The three main characters are Miss Amelia Evans, a small-town store owner who is six foot one and built like a man; the handsome outlaw Marvon Macey; and the hunchbacked dwarf Lymon, who turns up out of nowhere claiming to be a distant relative of to be Miss Amelia. Two little details stick in my mind: Miss Amelia’s torn dungarees which reveal a section of hairy, muscular thigh; and the simple sentence ‘This is what they did’, which precedes an orgy or destruction. Delicious slice of southern Gothic.
‘You have Left Your Lotus Pods on the Bus’ by Paul Bowles (Collected in The Stories of Paul Bowles, Ecco, 2001)
Paul Bowles claimed that this story is simply an account, accurate in every detail, of an incident that really did happen to him in Thailand. That is easy to believe, for it is one of the few short stories I can think of that could be re-told, without the text, as an entertaining anecdote: the essence of the story is not the words on the page but the sequence of events. It’s about an encounter between an American tourist and three Thai Buddhist monks, and deliciously highlights the mutual incomprehension of the two cultures. And it also has an extremely strong sense of place: you feel as if you have actually travelled on a hot crowded bus through rural Thailand by the time you reach the end.
‘Afterglow’ by Bill Duncan (In The Smiling School for Calvinists, Bloomsbury, 2001)
Every story in Bill Duncan’s collection The Smiling School for Calvinists is brilliant. Most are written in Scots dialect, which might make you think of Irvine Welsh, but I find Duncan both warmer and funnier. Some are set in the isolated fishing community of Broughty Ferry on the east coast of Scotland, featuring characters such as the Maist Ignorant Man in the World, while others take place in the high-rise housing estates of nearby Dundee. Anyway I had to choose one so I’ve chosen ‘Afterglow’ - one of the Dundee stories, though perhaps it’s not so much a story as a prose poem. I don’t usually like prose poems, in fact I hate them. But ‘Afterglow’ is impossible not to love. It’s a meditation while looking out of the window of a tower-block as the sun sets, recalling schooldays, games with fire, a rocket attack on a bus, suicidal bike-riding games – and then as twilight descends, we see the faces of the children returning to the tower-block, their games over: ‘The years tae come sometimes traced in the shadow of a face, already troubled or smilin, the mystery of a life yet to be lived in darkness, in light.’
‘Now More than Ever’ by Zadie Smith (First published in The New Yorker,July 2018)
‘Now More Than Ever’ appeared in the New Yorker, which I do not normally read, and I wouldn’t have come across it if someone hadn’t tweeted a link to it. The tweet contained a quote I was immediately attracted by: ‘I instinctively sympathize with the guilty. That’s my guilty secret’. I know exactly what she means. That’s me. The story is the first-person reflection of a university lecturer (philosophy) trying to keep up with the ethical and social demands of contemporary intellectual life: saying and believing the right things, associating with the right people and shunning the wrong, ‘squaring the present with the past’. But it’s such hard work. And never-ending. And if you put a foot wrong the game’s over for you. And the narrator’s heart isn’t altogether in it. Her friend Scout warns her, ‘if you don’t watch out you’re going to find yourself beyond the pale’. But the story makes us ask: Would it be so bad to be beyond the pale? Wouldn’t you then be... free?
Brandon Robshaw is a writer, poet and lecturer. He has published 26 children’s novels and over 60 educational books. His most recent children’s novel, The Big Wish, was published by Chicken House in 2015. It was shortlisted for the James Reckitt Hull Children’s Book Award 2016. His collection of children’s poems, These Are a Few of my Scariest Things, was published by the King’s England Press in 2017. His YA novel, The Infinite Powers of Adam Gowers, was published by Unbound in 2018.
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