SHORT STORIES: Caravan Thieves By Gerard Woodward, Chatto & Windus, £15.99 Gerard Woodward, it seems, can turn his hand to anything. First he wrote poetry, then an acclaimed trilogy of novels, one of which, I'll Go To Bed At Noon, was shortlisted for the Man Booker prize, and now here he is in Caravan Thieves, applying himself with the same deadpan ease to short stories, writes Fiona McCann.
HIS SUBJECTS are people - English, suburban, unremarkable. Their lives are strung together by the same quotidian activities that occupy all our lives: bathing, working, falling in and out of love, but in Woodward's worlds, these humdrum realities are shot through with the surreal, as if the frame of reference were slightly, almost imperceptibly tilted, unbeknownst to the characters trapped in them.
The book opens with Rape, a stark title for a tale whose protagonists are a retired, rotund couple, their greatest indulgence a slab of Diary Milk and tumbler of gin in front of the television every evening. Phil and Joyce live in a caravan - a twin-berth Fleetwood Marauder to be precise - and wake up one morning to discover it has been moved during the night from their tree-lined caravan park as they slept inside it. The caravan thieves of the collection's title have deposited the home of this elderly pair in the middle of a field of yellow flowers. It is this shift that sparks a violent impulse in pot-bellied, tree-loving Phil, an impulse so out of character it makes him all the more human.
The world of Phil and Joyce, and those of the other finely drawn characters from Caravan Thieves, mirror ours so closely that even when their reality is pushed out of alignment, the reader is lulled into a strangely docile acceptance of the bizarre events, narrated as they are in a tone that reflects more wonder in the flight path of a flock of seagulls than in a character who doesn't pass water for two years.
Abnormal circumstances become normalised, as in the delightfully titled You Are Here, which begins matter-of-factly: "It was a Saturday afternoon and Jake was on his way back from the betting shop, having just lost five pounds on a horse called It Takes Time, when he was set upon by a group of longbowmen."
There is humour here too: a medley of thoughts about horses and archery gives Jake the impression that he's been "set upon by a herd of centaurs"; a talking hat addresses a garden party guest with "Your arse stinks".
Sometimes the metaphors feel stretched, the significances unclear, but even this seems to be part of Woodward's plan to show how life consistently refuses to offer meaning, but gives us instead moments that have their own intrinsic value: an obese man swinging a sword from his sickbed, a romance that comes unstuck over a Full English Breakfast, a red Ferrari rusting in the grass on a worm farm. While Woodward does point up links between the images he draws and the passions and preoccupations of his characters, his principal concern seems to be to illustrate the absurd and marvellous nature of humanity.
There are moments of poetry, where the mundane is elevated by the attention Woodward pays to everyday objects. Even a filled, baked potato is imbued with an eloquent significance by the meticulous and lonely character who prepares it. "Cutting into the warm, plump vegetable was like slipping a knife into my own heart. I filled it with the last of my pre-grated Cheddar. I filled it until it looked like an open wound."
There is an apparently wilful straggling to some of the stories, a refusal of the kind of neat resolution the reader craves. That's life, though, messy, unresolved, surprising, unclean. It's in this dirt of life that Woodward finds a poetic, often poignant beauty, a dirt, he reminds us in the book's final lines, which is created by "people breathing and sweating, stirring up dust".
Fiona McCann is a journalist