Spider Season: I Wanted To Be Close To You By Katie Oliver

It is easy to be misled by the titles of Katie Oliver’s short stories: archly simple, the received effect is diversionary, inclined to blindside the reader towards satisfying conventional expectations. And up to a point they do, like bottles of HP Sauce, describe their contents.

But Oliver’s universe is surreal, fetid, and teeming with organic purpose, as though to reify the intrinsic meaning of the title tenfold, to make an irony of its apparent directness. ‘Together we Grow’, a dark excursion into uncontrol, is typical of the writer’s approach: the collusive title suggests an unquestioning abandonment to the hegemony of the natural world. A boyfriend’s interest in pot plants transforms into the slow metamorphosis of his partner, who submits to the ravening blandishments of the consuming plants as though inevitable. The process of submission is emollient, almost an act of contrition as the fabric of the girl’s flesh is ‘greened’: ‘Kindly souls drip nectar into my open mouth and allow me sips of water; I am leaf-skeleton light, but alive’.

The trope is repeated throughout I Wanted to be Close to You: hyper-sensitivity to nature, an obscure sense of ‘fellow feeling’ as palpable as that which was so vexatious to the spirit of the Victorian poet Swinburne as he gingerly sidestepped insects on his way to a mental breakdown, leads, in Oliver’s characterisation, to an actualised form of animism. The life cycle of office plants in ‘The Sanctuary’ is prolonged only because the story’s central protagonist is obsessed, removing them en masse from office neglect and giving them contentment and repose, resulting in a kind of unspoken reciprocation: ‘…a faint, harmonized angel’s song; a feather caressing the strings of a harp’.

Speculation as to thematic subtext is beguiling. There is danger at every narrative turn; women, who are the major protagonists here, are vulnerable, driven by strange inner compulsion, animated by instinctive connections with the otherwise insensate, and in possession of a kind of second sight. Witches and victims. And certainly the two definitions are realised in dangerous proximity in ‘Spider Season’, whose skilled concision (the story is four paragraphs in length) is its own reward. The nameless figure who knits her ‘web of fine grey wool’ as a throng of spiders multiply and propagate in dark corners succumbs, finally, to their burgeoning industry by beginning to sense ‘the throb of venom in her jaws’. ‘Spider Season’ is a fine platform for Oliver’s great skill of fusing searing description with fear: her secret resides in calmness of exposition, and if the detachment of her approach makes her characters somehow complicit in their own fates, any satirical ambiguity is intended:

‘The spiders grow fat on the creatures they catch, studding their gossamer cathedrals with the night’s spoils. A tiny black-and-yellow corpse dangles amidst the graveyard of flies, rotating ponderously on a silken string like a warning.’

And it might be that ‘victim’ has a wider cache in the lexicon of intoxicants under whose spell Oliver’s characters fall. The obsessive figure in the title story is abandoned to earth, to its teeming, rot-filed blandishments, as its stinking organic corruption co-mingles with the remains of a lover in a desperate scrabbling for re-union. The nature that is everywhere under threat in the non-fictive world resurges in these stories, a precise mirror to the irresistible primordial urges that impel the nameless figures in the landscape who are only half-human, shadows of prelapsarian simplicity, chthonic harbingers of regenerative Gaia.

The images of urban wastelands that we see in post-apocalyptic films seem always to be accompanied by a re-assertion of nature. Buildings and roads are overtaken by vegetation, and it is not hard to envisage a fecund new landscape subsuming the concrete in no time at all, as if Gaia could not wait for our municipal ‘concessions’ of rooftop gardens, city parks and enfilades of trees on crescents to become a uniformity of green, like the Sherwood Forest of the Middle Ages.

For if this slim volume is about the distance between expectation and reality, about where the interrogation of illusion may lead, we find mirrors to ecological decline in the atomised relationships that litter the wider narrative. The tone is near nihilistic, a rendering of the irreparable detachments and irremediable distances dividing male and female, of existential division. The character of Nadine in ‘All the Dead Girls’, whose husband Jason’s ‘relentless logic’ is made concise in his methodical eating habits, fails to find the aesthetic release she craves when the Northern Lights refuse to make an appearance on a holiday in Iceland, as if they, too, were obedient to the laws of ‘probabilities and averages’ which define Jason’s calculating unemotional gaze. When, at the end of the story, Aurora Borealis does materialise, its shimmering lights effect an epiphany of cold realisation:

‘As the colours moved over his face, green and turquoise and purple, it occurred to her that perhaps she didn’t really know him at all.’

Nadine’s subjection to a kind of psychological incarceration, and later ‘awakening’, is a theme repeated elsewhere in this arcane but compelling collection. The feckless and torpid indifference of the character of Chris in ‘Puff’ is a languid counterpoint to his wife, Lin’s, stoical concern: as she gnaws at the edges of her thumbnails, he disappears into insomniac disinterest. Oliver’s narrator is at her gallows best when ‘rattling through’ Chris’ rehabilitative options, ‘with depressing ease. Illegal sleeping pills from the U.S., sleep retreats, hypnosis, Jade eggs, melatonin, CBT. Divorce solicitors’. That he is deserving of no such help is deliciously ironised by the solution, which is found in the featureless soft robot, warm and fleshy to the touch, that breathes gently, encouraging deep sleep in the terminally restless. But the narcosis is equally terminal as Chris falls into a sleep that becomes a coma from which he cannot be roused. The burning of his mangy blanket at the end of a story of neglected love and abuse is drawn with an edgy, conflicted diffidence: ‘Lin bit down on her knuckle until the frost at her feet glittered scarlet, and the blanket was nothing but ash’.

Oliver is a wonderfully inventive storyteller. The bridging of psychological gaps with artificial placebos and palliatives, like Puff, litters her conceptual alphabet. Broaching the subjects of Artificial Intelligence and genetically engineered, selective breeding, the writer makes ciphers of her female characters - compliant, sometimes complicit, players in their own dramas. Unravelling her stories, as it were, directly to camera, Oliver renders them authentic, even in surreal guise. And if we are minded to reflect on Margaret Atwood, on Aryanism, and on the subjugation of women by a controlling patriarchy, then the intuition is a by-product of the genuinely frightening atmosphere which permeates many of Oliver’s narratives. Not least in the Kafka-esque, claustrophobic nightmare of ‘Underbelly’, whose matter-of-fact opening in a dystopian maternity unit is deliberately betrayed by the forensic accretion of layers of fear towards the end. The removal of personal agency here, and across the collection, is a palpable characteristic of the writer’s tone:

‘Claire could hear the smiles in their voices as they spoke to her. But when she scanned their eyes they were blank; four pale orbs hovering coldly over the top of surgical masks. Knife-grey, shark-blue.’

And just as we were beginning to assume an homogeneity of theme and style, we find, nestled at the book’s midpoint, the counter-intuitive surprise of ‘Shell Tide’, an exquisitely written story of an unsolicited meeting on an Irish beach. Leaving her audience to reconstruct the fragmentary lives of three characters – a Frenchwoman, Mirabelle, a local, John, and a farmer, Donovan – Oliver reveals only the salient features of the day: the gentle beauty of a landscape that will endure, sudden gunshots echoing across the strand, and the suggestion of transient symbols hidden amongst the rocks. It is fitting, in a tale of portents and signs, that a kind of continuity is vouchsafed amongst the reliquaries of shells:

‘As the shell changes hands, damp sand smears across both of their palms: a transaction that somehow feels as though a promise has been made.’