The collection is made up of a group of short stories and one longer piece. The main theme of the collection concerns the choices we make in our lives, the impact of those choices and the perception we later have of those choices, particularly the more melancholy emotions: regret, yearning, loss, longing and nostalgia. The longer story is about how a character called George becomes a sort of fantasy, ideal partner in the lives of the other characters, based on their different levels of interaction with him, past, present and future.
Some of the pieces have reference to fairy tales, to attempt to illustrate how we make stories of our lives - and perhaps highlight the dislocation between the fantasy narratives we make and the reality. Other stories - including the first story - support the main theme by examining how the same events are open to different interpretations, according to the viewpoint of different characters.
Sample 1. ANTHROPOLOGY
Abu Sen Isi was a star. A chieftain’s son, a shaman, apparently a veteran of innumerable journeys through the moonlit underworld, riding a ceremonial cockerel, his brow fevered by the liquorice-tasting leaves of the Osomo tree, hands gripping the scarlet wattle. Whilst his contemporaries shuffled embarrassedly before the camera in baggy y-fronts or ragged shorts, he alone stood proud in his decorated penis-gourd and hyena tooth necklace. He alone still sported the incisor of a carnivore - the totem of the tribe - in his pierced nose, the fang aggressively up-turned against his cheeks. He out-stared even the telephoto lens; the arms folded against his chest were the muscled and excoriated limbs of a warrior, with many kills.
Abu was the guardian of his tribe’s tradition and taboo, confidant of the ancestral dead. He had spent seven years in the land beyond the mountains (the only term the Keemu people had for distance and travel). He had returned but lately, stepping out from the dripping line of the forest, dragging by its heel a newly-slaughtered wild hog. The immemorial rites were briefly restored as the hog turned on the spit that night.
Professor Jacques and his crew were fascinated by him. As Abu led them through the claustrophobic green spaces of the forest, he pointed out the tribe’s landmarks - the alter-piece, gory with generations of formal sacrifice, unmistakeably phallic; the long house, from which boys emerged as men, walking tentatively after the recent mutilation of their parts, but still smug with rationed knowledge (they would never acknowledge their mothers again after this ritual); sacred groves, enclosed by stones marked with ancient runes; the burnt-out mission, upon which Abu refused to comment. Abu seemed to know instinctively when the camera jammed or ran out of film and only then did he seem to relax a little and accept a Marlboro Light from the sound man. Although they could only communicate through sign language, from the way Abu watched their faces and gestures, Professor Jacques felt he understood every word they said.
Professor Jacques stayed with the tribe for six months and then returned home for editing and to complete his large-format coffee-table book. Professor Jacques was feted. His book was a best-seller, poignant in its final glimpse of a lost tribe teetering on the point of assimilation into the Western world. You could almost smell the camp-fires, burning just a few yards from the screeching chain saws and massive earth movers of the loggers, the rising smoke tangy with the smell of the dried dung of the wild boar burned by the Keemu. The film of the book received unprecedented ratings for a special interest programme and even had a limited cinema run in the overseas markets. Professor Jacques kept the ‘Emmy’ he received, unostentatiously beside the spare toilet roll in the downstairs loo (he had heard that Emma Thompson kept hers there).
But there was another book published that year.
Dr A S Isi had returned to Yale after his sabbatical (his hands and face an even deeper shade of copper than usual), with the proofs of his latest book: ‘Deconstructing the Anthropological Film-maker’.
Dr Isi had eschewed the sexier title proposed by his publisher. He had his academic credibility to maintain after all, and he was happy if his royalties were sufficient to cover his annual gym subscription.
Sample 2 THE OLD WOMAN AND THE WOLF
Once upon a time there lived an old woman who cultivated the acquaintance of a wolf. The woman would save increasingly substantial titbits from her table and nurse his big black head, with its bristling snout and dramatic, yellow teeth, in her lap. The wolf became a regular visitor, her door grooved with his almost daily clawing at it.
One day, the wolf arrived unexpectedly early and found the old woman without a scrap of food in the house. So the wolf ate the old woman instead. Whilst systematically removing the flesh from the old woman, the wolf unfortunately choked to death on one of her splintered, arthritic thigh bones.
When they found the wolf, stretched in the debris some days later, he was wearing the old woman’s dress and shoes.
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