In Foreign Parts, there’s a sense that time is running out. Our narrator, Simon, is like a man sinking in quicksand. He’s a man of routine. Rising, dressing, travelling to work on the DLR. Every day is the same. His sense of self is slipping away as he becomes (perhaps literally) someone else. It’s a similar story for Dr Benham, stuck in his STD clinic watching a parade of patients come and go. In his parallel story of metamorphosis he’s being spat out by his own life. He too is becoming a different person, from the feet up
We’re caught in the nocturnal world of the all-night cafe. Joyce, a very pregnant young waitress, is our way in. A man from her past, Eddie Barrow, appears as if from nowhere with a pressing urgency to tell his story. Joyce wants us to hear it. Eddie tells us a love story – a strange, Gothic, warped and weird love story. He tells us about Effie, the old lady who lives in a room opposite his in a boarding house. Effie is a remarkable, magical woman. However, she needs raw meat to survive.
Our narrator in Closing Time is a raconteur, a writer and late-night barfly engaging in the tradition of weaving club stories for his fellow drinkers. Feeling the warmth of company and loosened by drink, he expertly draws people in as he spins his tale. He’s also suppressing a painful memory. Guilt-ridden thoughts have haunted him since childhood and they manifest themselves as a ghost story, his past consumed by the human instinct to mythologise memories when they hurt too much.
Dean Smith is an ageing photographer. He’s almost 70, but there’s still a glint in his eye. TV’s ‘face of culture’, Miranda Walker, is interviewing him for television and asks about his muse. Once the cameras are off the question unlocks a story about Charlotte, aged 19, a Penthouse model. As old magazines and photographs are pulled from shelves it emerges that he’s a man consumed by an untouchable fantasy. A two-dimensional image sparked a moment of sexual awakening that he’s spent a lifetime trying to recapture.
Cult writer Neil Gaiman discusses the storytelling process behind his Likely Stories.
