Charles Wilkinson (2)

I was going to write that the stories in this collection could best be described as 'subdued', but actually it's more accurate to say there's a muffled quality to them, a sense that they're the equivalent of a conversation heard from the next room. I was thinking too that they've a relation to de la Mare's stories, but if they do it's from an inverse approach--in the most memorable of de la Mare's writings, there's little in the way of incident but in Wilkinson's book there are murders, suicide, alcoholism, mental illness, yet none of these is treated as in any way dramatic or even telling. Both authors though create a strong sense of atmosphere and more obliquely an impression of the uncanny and of much being left unsaid.

Most of the stories are narrated in the first person and many of them wander back to the narrators' memories of childhood. The storylines are unremarkable and the elements wholly realistic but I'd the feeling of their being wrapped in several layers of cotton wool, rather than a sense of immediacy. I'd a feeling as well that those country houses visited as a child would now all be burned to the ground, the acquaintances made in the past all now disappeared, and the narrators themselves fallen back into the oblivion from which they had barely, briefly, emerged to tell their tales.

There's nothing remotely airy-fairy or precious about the book, though. Wilkinson gives the best description I've read of bedsit land--a frighteningly demanding landlady renting frigid rooms to a tenant who is dissolving into quiet despair, and a description of the stifling atmosphere of a provincial pub is amusing, reminscent of but less heavy-handed than similar scenes in Hamilton's Mr Stimpson and Mr Gorse

I'm giving a link to an online story by Wilksinson with the caveat that it's rather unlike the stories in Pain Tree: it has more descriptive detail and a more linear plot than they, as well as a clearly-defined climax that they as on the whole lack. It does though impart that slight sense of strangeness. http://middle-planet.com/2015/07/15/wilkinson/… (meer)