Caravan Thieves

Gerard Woodward's memorable first collection of stories gives us his own peculiar fictional world, in which the surreal makes its incursions into everyday lives. Their comedy is generally of the painful kind, and the macabre is always threatening to overwhelm disaffected characters, often trapped in mundane marriages or occupations.

Marriage and its discontents appears to be an abiding theme. This can be treated fairly lightheartedly, as in 'Cleopatra' when a man meets his former wife on a train and has to endure an uncomfortable visit to her home and opinionated husband. 'My Husband's Dream' turns out to be a worm farm, run by an attractive divorcee - who may or may not be a murderess. Adultery has more serious consequences in 'Ultima Pangea', as a woman forces her lover to bring his faith-healing wife to the hospital to try to save her pregnancy. And  'Firemen' is a quietly horrific tale of a woman going to bed with one of the firefighters who recently attended a fire outside her house - at which her bankrupt ex-husband had burned himself to death.  

Typical of Woodward's world is the mundane scene that slips somehow into the extraordinary. In the opening story 'Rape', for instance, a caravanning middle-aged couple, Phil and Joyce, awaken to find themselves mysteriously 'somewhere else'. Disheveled and bewildered, they start walking, directionless. Perhaps this is too obviously symbolic of their own mid-life disorientation. But there's a twist: Phil's fantasies of sexual violence towards his wife, which are hinted at in the title, and when he notices 'a wedge of shadow so thick it was like a private patch of night-time'.  

Other stories feature a children's entertainer whose job is 'heartbreaking work'; a man shot by arrows who drags himself home for a pointless last conversation with his brother; and, in 'Hygiene', a snackbar assistant forced out of his daydreams about a woman customer by the unexpected visit of health inspectors. Yet even for such discontented and harassed characters, redemption is - sometimes - possible. A disgraced lecturer, after losing a sexual harassment case, takes a job in the kitchens at his former university, secretly collecting rat poison from its traps. Instead of the poisoning scenario we might anticipate however, he finds a new perspective when spontaneously helping a young woman prepare fruit dishes for a graduation meal ('Strawberries').

As befits a writer with a considerable reputation as a poet, Woodward's imagery is clever, at times disturbingly edgy. He is an acclaimed novelist also - I'll Go to Bed at Noon was shortlisted for the 2004 Mann Booker Prize. Like the unseen perpetrators in the story about Caravan Thieves, the insidious effects of the surreal on human lives are captured vividly in these accomplished and surprising stories.