Sunday May 24, 2009
Details matter
Review by AMY DE KANTER
Despite some good moments, this collection of short stories falls short.
TALES FROM THE COURT
By Matthew Thomas
Publisher: Silverfish Books, 176 pages
ISBN: 978-9833221219
I AM as excited as any book-lover by the sudden explosion in works by local authors. Many of them are fantastic. Many more would have been great if they had received a good dose of tough love from a savvy editor. Matthew Thomas’ Tales of the Court, unfortunately, belongs to the latter group.
From story tweaking to grammar and spelling errors, Tales from the Court could have benefited from an editor’s stern red pen.
The better the story, the more distracting the mistakes or inconsistencies. I was quite enjoying Musso the Exorcist, a ghost story with some honest-to-goodness spine-tingling moments. The suspense builds, then the horror. One of the characters, Abdul Rahman, has decided (as people in ghost stories always inexplicably do) to spend the night in a house rumoured to be haunted. Naturally, strange sounds wake him up in the middle of the night.
“Some horrible things must have happened in this house,” Abdul Rahman ruminates.
You think? I’m pretty sure that anyone who spends the night in a haunted house and hears eerie sounds, might freeze, scream, run, perhaps even go mad. He almost certainly would not sit and ponder.
In case you think that this character was made of stronger stuff, the author does go on to try and convince us that he is really terrified. “His mind went blank. Fear had an all-consuming effect on him, and it crippled him.” Too late. The spell has already been broken by the character’s musings that maybe this was not always the happiest of places.
Some of the stories, like The Kite Fight, are very good. The best are the ones that read like memoirs. The first parts of Mother and My Neighbourhood Revisited are as charming as they are engaging.
I say the first part of Mother because it, like a couple of other stories, would have been better for ending at an earlier point. Mother is a tender story about a little boy’s memories of story-time with his mother. The story she tells is excellent on its own, but all the more interesting because of the woman telling it and the effect it has on her children.
Unfortunately, once again just as we are enjoying the view, Thomas plunges us into a tunnel and we pop out again blinking at entirely different scenery.
From a child crawling into bed with his mother, we are rudely thrown into a rambling taxi ride that includes spending hours in a traffic jam and watching someone else eat banana leaf rice. By then, no effort on the author’s part can make it feel like part of the story we were reading earlier.
So much of what has emerged by local authors is non-fiction: Memoirs, histories, and current events. I have not read many collections of short stories by Malaysian authors, in fact, none at all in recent history, so fiction writers like Thomas should be encouraged to continue writing and continue publishing.
A singer’s excellent voice is distorted by a faulty microphone, a dancer accidentally slides across the floor because the stage was not properly prepared....
Thomas can and does write very well but technicalities do matter. We have shown we can write and we can publish. Now, can we please edit?
Source:
RSS
