In many ways, these stories of Fraser’s are not my usual cup of tea, dealing as they do with “the quivering sensibilities of the self” (Alan Bilton), an arena that I prefer to scuttle past on my way to something less emotionally charged. Hers are stories of the everyday lived experience, and (possibly in consequence) most of them make for grim reading: a boat is shattered and along with it, hopes of retrieving a marriage, parents mourn lost children, people grasp at brief happinesses or the reassurance of memories.

Fraser has noted on her website her explicit intention to give cohesion to the stories through their geographic location, and that psychogeography was central to her writing process. The locations are also what make the stories stand out. They are all set in Wales, the “wind-flensed land’s end of north Gower” and she does a magnificent job of presenting both natural and built environments. Each setting is as distinct and nuanced as a well-turned character, and interacts with the humans with a remote, autonomous implacability. Because the quality of the nature and geographical writing is so strong, any of them could be included here. The one selected is ‘On the Fourteenth Day’.

The narrative is primarily one of loss. A young man is drowned in a surfing accident, and his body is washed out to sea. The story’s point of view is that of May, a neighbour, who has a peculiar acuity of perception with regard to the natural world, to its changes and to the significance and implications of the signs of light, or wind, or clouds. She sees the young man’s father on the beach each day, sitting on a boulder, waiting for the body to be washed ashore. May’s position is awkward, because she is not a close friend, and is deeply sympathetic, but she also knows how long the bereaved father will have to wait before the sea gives up its dead.

The story is a sort of tipping-point between two atmospheres arising from Fraser’s Gower. The language Fraser uses to create this world is very material and realistic, vivid enough to make the cold and the lowering sky feel uncomfortably present. There are uncanny, intangible shades to the Gower Fraser presents, too. Sometimes the uncanny or the strange is oblique or may be imaginary (are the cockles literally “filling the eerie landscape with music”?) or very overtly odd (like the abandoned husband who tries to reassemble dead wasps). Then there is a very direct allusion in one story, where a grey mare is at once an actual animal, a conduit of fraternal anger, and the hobby-horse figure in Welsh Christmas traditions, known as the Mari Lwyd, which translates (so Museum Wales tells me) as the grey mare. ‘On the Fourteenth Day’ balances between the two approaches. May’s account of the fourteen days—the hunched figure of the father, the cold beach, the effect of the sun on uneven ground—is sensuous and realistic. But her alertness to the world around her is both canny and uncanny. It is a particular form of knowing, and of shrewdness, but it is so very heightened that it becomes a strange gift. It troubles her, too, as she wrestles with deciding what, if anything, she should say to the bereaved father, as she knows how long he must wait. 

First published in The South Westerlies, Salt Publishing, 2019