LEARNING TO TALK: Stories, by Hilary Mantel
Hilary Mantel’s short story collection “Learning to Talk” was first published in the UK in 2003, before much anticipated awards and international fame came its way. It shares the qualities of the contemporary novels she wrote for twenty years: keen observation, alertness to the madness of class and gender, an uncanny ability to the eye of the child, a door always open to the supernatural. And like Mantel’s most famous books, these stories are dark and absurd, the whistling children’s voices brewed in wisdom and worldliness.
They are fictional stories. It says on the back, and they have the structure and weight of the well-crafted short story. But they also weave around parts of Mantel’s memoir, ‘Giving Up the Ghost’, which deals with writing and chronic illness and infertility, as well as growing up in a divided, socially mobile family living in haunted houses in the North West of England. These stories are also about that experience, their narrators children and teenagers at odds with their families, neighbors and schools, striving to decipher the unspoken, and often hindered more than helped by cleverness and curiosity.
We begin with echoes of Wordsworth and Thomas Hood, early prophets of the belief that the child is the father of the man: “I can’t get out of my mind, now, the village where I was born, just from the curl of the city tentacles… But we didn’t like the Mancunians.” The narrator, Liam, and his mother don’t like everyone, not his missing father, not their troubled and disturbed neighbors, not the teachers at the school and certainly not the children who sing anti-Catholic songs with Liam. flowed through my veins; my fingers itched for triggers; post offices were fortified behind my eyes.” The Catholic Child’s wrath takes the form of the Troubles, which simmer misunderstood and half-recognized in the background of northern British towns.
Each story loops around, playing with the unrecognized moment when a child’s life shifts: the killing of a dog, the experience of getting lost and finding oneself, the teen’s realization that loving adults can be all wrong. about what is important, daughters recognizing their mother’s life after motherhood. The crucial moments are historically exact. In the title story, the narrator looks back on years of speech lessons taught after moving from a village school to the engine of social mobility that was English secondary school (academic elite secondary education offered free to anyone who could pass the entrance exam, although the exams inevitably the wealthy beneficiaries). In an exemplary use of the passive voice: “People thought I should be a lawyer. So I was sent to Miss Webster to learn how to speak properly.” Miss Webster has only one lung and her own accent is “precarious genteel, Manchester with cherry.” The precision of the sets is part of the joy of reading these stories: the narrator “wandered home through the darkening streets, past other wool shops with baby clothes on the windows, and the village delicatessen with its range of pale meats ,” passing commuters “rushing home to their through lounges.” (A “lounge” is a still-downgraded term for a sitting room; “thru” means the wall that once separated it from the now redundant dining room has been demolished. England, lower-middle-class, post-war.)
In this more or less autobiographical time frame of the 1960s and 1970s, Mantel remains a historical novelist, that is, someone who is always thinking about how politics, trends and events shape character, someone who knows in every sense that the political is personal and vice vice versa. , one who inhabits bodies shaped by the specificities of time and place. Part of her consistent brilliance lies in her attention to ghosts and mortgages, the light on the heath and 1980s Education Policy, Adolescent Self-Discovery and irregular accounting. These stories contain worlds as broad as those of her longest novels.
Sarah Moss’ latest novel is ‘The Fell’.
LEARN TO TALK, by Hilary Mantel | 161 pages | Henry Holt | $19.99