You could argue that all fiction asks you to do one of two things: to believe or to suspend disbelief. You could also argue that, providing one or the other is possible, they yield the same outcome – a state of willing collusion with the author. In my own experience, the more immersive I’ve found a story at the time of reading the more I’m likely to have enjoyed it, and to remember it.
Carys Davies is immensely skilful in accumulating the tiny increments of detail that build a sense of immersion. So much so that when deeply improbable events take place, albeit at times within the most mundane circumstances, the reader is primed, cleverly and unobtrusively, to accept them. Her persuasiveness, and she is the most persuasive of writers, also derives from a consistency and intimacy of tone that imbues her stories with credibility. Her characters are built from their doubts, their disappointments, their failures, and yet her narratives, more often than not, are driven by hope. The desire to know how or whether that hope will be realised, or even to learn exactly what manner of hope will be unfurled, is the force that pulls the reader through the story.
‘The Quiet’, opening Davies’ second collection, epitomises aspects of the stories to follow. In one way or another – physically, psychologically, geographically – her characters find themselves alone. They are isolated within their circumstances. And they possess secrets by which they are burdened, which are cleverly hidden from the reader, and which lead them to yearn for some sort of release or fulfilment.
Like the other stories in the collection, ‘The Quiet’ has much to say about the intractability of lives lived in unforgiving conditions, about the exchange of hidden elements of personal history, about improbable moments of empathy, and about the urgency of the human heart needing to unburden itself.
Susan Boyce and Henry Fowler – she married, he formerly so, live as settlers six miles apart in an isolated, unspecified valley. On rare occasions Henry visits, and on one such occasion something extraordinary, but heartrendingly credible, occurs. And that is all I can say without ruining a story that presses deep into our need to share a common humanity. Please read it.
First published in The Stinging Fly, 2014, then in the collection The Redemption of Galen Pike, Salt 2014. Available to read online at LitHub
A Personal Anthology 