My Life With Eva by Alex Barr - reviewed by David Gardiner
B RE OOK VI EW
Parthian Books 2017 174 pages £8.99 Not Adolf Hitler's intimate diary but a collection of short stories whose unifying theme, in so far as one can be identified, is ‘that tide in the affairs of men that taken at the flood leads on to fortune'. Most of them take the format of an inner monologue in which the protagonist looks back on a moment of decision that, seen in retrospect, determined the course of everything that came after. But while the ‘tide' metaphor suggests something big and unmistakable, often the moment in question is at the time marked by no more than a ripple. My favourite in the collection is the title story, in which the elderly male protagonist looks back on his decision to break off a ‘safe' relationship with a sweet but very conventional small-town girl with whom he felt he could have had a life of pleasant contentment and instead take a chance on a far less certain future with Eva, the ‘free spirit' with whom he has in fact lived a life of adventure and challenge that has allowed all of his potential to blossom. It is a fundamentally celebratory piece, the narrator has nothing to regret, no disappointment about missed opportunities or wasted years or things that might have been. Like most of the stories in the collection it teaches the lesson that all tragedy is at base the tragedy of wasted opportunity and unfulfilled potential. Practically all of Barr's stories begin with extended descriptions of locations, a format seldom recommended and one that can at times test the patience of the reader, but its function here is to establish the atmosphere of the piece and the setting from which the narrator surveys his or her life in the rear-view mirror. The stories are mostly heartfelt confessions delivered in a mood of tranquillity and contemplation. You will be disappointed if you want car chases, explosions or alien abductions. These are in fact stories for thoughtful grown-ups, from a writer whose previous published prose was aimed entirely at a childhood audience. It took me a little time to ‘tune in' to Barr’s style, but when I did I found the offerings richly
rewarding and often worthy of a second reading to extract all of their juices. In the last few stories, where he tries to be more experimental, his writing in my opinion becomes less sure-footed. There is a fantasy about God encouraging Adam to find names for things in the Garden of Eden whose point frankly eludes me, and a tongue-in-cheek variation on the old notion of monkeys rewriting the works of Shakespeare by entirely random strokes on keyboards, which again falls far short of similar spoof science fiction by the likes of Douglas Adams and Robert Sheckley. There are I think only two examples in which Barr takes the role of omniscient author and writes in the third person. The Fan concerns the aftermath of an affair between a minor composer and and a theatre costume designer, and in my opinion stands in need of an edit for length and is less involving than his first-person narratives. Another, in which he writes in the voice of an unconvincingly knowing child didn’t appeal to me a great deal either. But while Barr remains within his comfort zone as a writer his stories can stand comparison with the absolute best.
GOLD DUST
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Gold Dust
issue 33 summer 2018