The Beautiful Indifference (15 page)

The Beautiful Indifference
is a work of fiction. Characters, events and place names are products of the author’s imagination, or, if real, are not portrayed with geographical and historical accuracy.

P.S.

Insights, Interviews & more …

About the author

Meet Sarah Hall

About the book

Sarah Hall on Short Fiction

Read on

Have You Read? More by Sarah Hall

About the Author

Meet Sarah Hall

Richard Thwaites

S
ARAH
H
ALL WAS BORN IN
1974 in Cumbria, England. She received a master of letters in creative writing from Scotland’s University of St. Andrews, and has published four novels.
Haweswater
won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (Overall Winner, Best First Book) and a Society of Authors Betty Trask Award.
The Electric Michelangelo
was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize, the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (South Asia and Europe region), and the Prix Femina-Roman Etranger, and was long-listed for the Orange Prize for Fiction.
Daughters of the North
won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and the James Tiptree, Jr. Literary Award, and was short-listed for the Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction.
How to Paint a Dead Man
was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize and won the Portico Prize. Hall lives in Norfolk, UK.

About the Book

Sarah Hall on Short Fiction

R
ECENTLY
I
WAS ON TOUR IN
I
RELAND
, home of some of the best storytellers ever to have lifted a pen or spun a yarn, and I was in a discussion with the audience after a reading. A hand went up. A gentleman asked me what constituted a good short story. What was a good short story made of? Ah yes, I thought, that question gets down to the bottom of the glass. I mulled it over for a while, and he waited for an answer. So much of writing is intuitive, inexplicable, even as society insists on scrutinising literary proclivities and processes, as well as the finished article. It’s hard to excavate those subterranean levels of creativity and creative awareness, let alone understand function. Why has a style or language been employed? Why is a particular form essential for a particular subject? How do words convert into gold, into electricity, into mysterious, highly charged matter, the stuff readers require? I admire when a writer, under heavy interrogation, shrugs, as James Salter did in the
Paris Review
, “The Art of Fiction No 133.” “I like to write,” he said. “I’m moved by writing. One can’t analyze it beyond that.” Salter was, however, in the middle of one of the most articulate and illuminating interviews I’ve ever read. The handoff was simply him taking a breath before reengaging with intellectual business and exquisite expression. Or perhaps it was the apex of truthfulness; this declaration of the unknowable, the unwillingness to attempt to quantify.

There are many ways to begin to think about what a good short story is or might be. Tight structure, inelaborate architecture, narrative propulsion or switchback or chasm, entrance and exit strategy, disturbance of the quotidian, experimental psychology, metaphysical miniaturism, a fun run for the soul’s voice, dose of pure biological world, an act of moderate civil or moral heresy. I don’t really know, I said to the gentleman questioner, sorry. This did not go down well. I looked like an avoider of difficult questions, which I suppose I was, though the evasion was not meant to be chary. Better might have been to give examples of stories by writers I admire (Mr. Salter, Faulkner, Kevin Barry, Tessa Hadley, to name just a few). That way I could have illustrated what I think a good story is or can be.

Like many unanswered questions, this one stuck in my brain. Not because I feel I’m not equipped to intuit and analyse—I trust that I can
sense
what a good story is, even if I can’t fully, unmetaphorically describe it. Some days I myself would like to fathom exactly what that golden, electrical, particle-reactor core is. Because the short story remains exceptional, doesn’t it? Radiant? Dangerous? It is a device of inordinate power. It’s easily as powerful as a novel, perhaps more active and potent than a novel, for its scope within strictures, its concentration, its resourcefulness in the face of austerity and minimal apparatus.

What I can say is that I love writing in the short form and have been doing so for as long as I’ve been writing novels. My work has a tendency toward the episodic, the cinematic, the disquiet of looking through the locked door’s keyhole, the flip side—all of which suits this fictional mode. I don’t claim mastery—I’d point to the previous list of names for that—but this collection has been ruthlessly cut and curated, honed to the pieces I feel achieve a certain standard. Of beauty, significance, catastrophe, eroticism, even epiphany, which some would argue is rare in life and therefore not relevent to craft: those moments when our strange, vexing, mutable existences momentarily come into focus.

The couple of years leading up to this book’s production were very challenging for me, and involved illness, loss, travel, and love, the kind of love that mortifies and elates, that creates a hyperreality. The safety nets come down. Suddenly everything is acute and consequential. You know the feeling. My response, my management, was a series of tales, not tales of me—I’m a reconstituter rather than a diarizer—but tales within which these matters feature. The plots reveal such, and on other levels there are signs too; in the landscape, in animal totems and ferality, in human priorities. Redness in a lake. A bolting horse. Hunting equating with loving. A speculative book about the end of the world. Survivals of the self, and assertions of living. In one of the stories, set in Mozambique, a woman notes that sometimes you find yourself in a situation, physical or emotional, where the extreme meaning of being, and of being mortal, that underlying sharpness, ruptures through the calm surface, obliterating the order we strive so hard to create. What occur are brief moments of messy honesty. Chaos passes. Darkness lifts or the sun finally sets. Life stabilises. But perhaps these are the times when we truly inhabit ourselves, when we are made manifest. Likewise, I suspect that is what a good short story is or can be.

Read on

Have You Read? More by Sarah Hall

HOW TO PAINT A DEAD MAN

The lives of four individuals—a dying painter, a blind girl, a landscape artist, and an art curator—intertwine across nearly five decades in this luminous and searching novel of extraordinary power.

“Invigorating … This deeply sensual novel is what you rarely find—an intelligent page-turner which, perversely, you also want to read slowly to savor Hall’s luscious way of looking at the world.”

—Sunday Telegraph
(London)

Y
OU AREN’T FEELING LIKE YOURSELF
. You haven’t been feeling like yourself for a while now, not since the accident. More accurately, not since the moment you heard about it. That morning, that minute, holding the phone to your ear and hearing your father say those horrific words; it was then you felt the change, then when you were knocked out of kilter. You’re not sure what’s wrong exactly; it’s hard to put your finger on, hard to articulate. It isn’t grief. Grief would be simple. Something internal, something integral, has shifted. You feel lost from yourself. No.
Absent
. You feel absent. It’s like looking into a mirror and seeing no familiar reflection, no one you recognise hosted within the glass.

You’re not crazy. You must emphasise this point and remind yourself of it. You are not crazy. And you’re not being coy, or difficult. This isn’t about fashionable social detachment, the current trend for woe-is-me, or wanting to be the cool detached outsider. You can’t quite catch sight of yourself as you go about your life, that’s all. Your body doesn’t contain its spirit, just as the mirror has relinquished your portrait. You are elsewhere.

You used to feel something similar as a child, but it was less empty, less lonely then. Your brother was the same. The pair of you had a peculiar sense of each other, not as separate people but as doppelgängers, symmetries, which is quite common in twins of course. You weren’t formed from a separated egg—you weren’t identical, not a common gender, John and Jack, or Ruth and Rita. Still, there you were, together, from the very beginning. You linked fingers in the womb. You shared a pillow of placenta, pedalled in tandem against your mother’s belly. You heard concurrently the wet chamber music of her body, shared nutrients, and dreamt the same hermetic dream. After you were born, pink then blue, you then Danny, your existences were still pegged closely together, like your newborn hats on the washing line.

Later, it was as if you were sitting with him on the sofa, at his exact coordinates, when really you were sitting opposite him at the table, making potato prints with your mum. Sometimes you felt you were more at his location than you were at yours. Ulterior proximity, it’s called. When you waved it wasn’t to your brother, it was to yourself. Nobody ever worked that out, not even your mum, who said,
Wave to Danny again, sweetheart, he’s waving back
. You were placed in separate cribs, but the heat of him still kept you warm at night. He still tugged the blanket away from your cheek when he tucked it up under his own. At least, that’s how it felt.

Inevitably, you learned to talk. This is when things got tricky. You developed a method of speaking on behalf of the displaced you. It was logical, in a way. At first they thought you were speaking on behalf of your brother, as bossy older siblings often do.
You want juice please
, you said, and they gave it to Danny in his chewed sippy-mug.
And would you like some juice too, Suzie-Sue
, they crooned.
Such an adorable bond
, people said.
So unusual
. There were lots of baby photographs taken with you looking quizzical, frowning at items around the room or at the adults posing with you. Your brother was quiet, quieter than you, and always smiling, as if he knew a secret.