It's off to work we go

SHIFTS by Adam Thorpe (Cape, 14.99)

ADAM Thorpe has a playwright's gift for voices. Ulverton revealed this with its brilliant mimicry of historical registers, its care for local language and landscape, its bitter elegiac passion for the voices and crafts of the past. Still, though far too long, displayed an uncanny vocal range too, with its mix of grimly empty postmodern chic and painstaking recreation of Edwardian tonalities. Pieces of Light showed what a fine memory Thorpe has for voice, as he fished in his childhood past in Cameroon for the old tales he'd been told by the Africans. Shifts is more than a collection of short stories - it is a fine demonstration of this power to shift from voice to voice.

Thorpe has been careful not to publish merely a series of disconnected tales. All the stories in Shifts share the same topic: work. We get the mason's tale, the glass worker's tale, the mechanic's tale ... Thorpe is examining exactly how far individuals are locked into ideology and culture through the work they do.

His ecological belief has him concentrate particularly on the industries that most remorselessly destroy pastoral-human value in the world. The businessmen who ruin Ulverton are satirised again, this time in the guise of a swimming-pool salesman shown cruelly mangling the family farm in order to spite his "green" sister's dying wishes. A traveller with old-fashioned mason's skills is ripped off in entrepreneurial France and made to do breeze blocks. A young Asian boy is maimed physically and psychologically by his job in a neon factory.

More interesting than these rather soap-boxy ecological parables are the work stories which dwell on stranger and more fearful forms of complicity.

Thorpe has lived in France for 10 years now, and is clearly concerned to explore the darker side to Europe: Tyres is about the costs of doing business in occupied France, the extraordinary Iron looks hard at the ordinary Germans who tacitly followed Hitler.

There are structural threads running through the tales too, alongside the shared theme of work and complicity in a dark world: in each we get an unreliable narrator reflecting on some victim of whatever system the work involves. So we get a nasty rep being unctuous about his dead mechanic brother in Bodywork, but revealing murderous impulses at every slip of the tongue. A blowsy girlfriend enthuses about her partner's skills in making model boats, but harsh tones of triumph colour her tale of his decline into alcoholism. These tales are brilliant exercises in dramatic monologue, more Bennett than Browning.

More intriguing are the narrators who don't even begin to understand the stories they are telling, like the bin-man who is taunted with visions of pornography in a house with a dark mirror- window, or the callow American who encounters a bizarre tramp in existential Paris, or the sawyer who tells the tale of a sawmill manager who goes to the limits of primitive bloodletting.

Thorpe is very good at these fantastic tales, seriously crossing the psycho-cultural with the supernatural.

But the triumphs of this collection have nothing to do with ecology, work, ideology, unreliability.

What Thorpe is good at, what only he at the moment can do in "millennial" English writing (that's how it'll be known, I'm afraid), is worm his way into the voices of people that are just outside the range of our complacent ease with the world.

He makes us feel, as we read, that these very different people, whether they be bin-men, masons, car-mechanics or slick businessmen, are mysteries to themselves, but more importantly, mysteries, still, despite the best of our smug interpretations, to us.

Copyright 2000
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