'Short' short stories do not mean 'sweet' necessarily and in the case of the very short stories in Vanessa Gebbie's Storm Warning: Echoes of Conflict, short certainly does not mean easy. It's hard to pull off a really good short story and Gebbie's collection includes nearly two dozen very sharp and intense stories of war and its aftermath. Actually the subtitle of this collection is very telling and perfectly describes what you will find--Echoes of Conflict. None of the stories actually take place on a battlefield in the heat of the moment. These stories are all about what comes after. How the pain and suffering resonates years and decades later and far away from the intensity of war. But the pain and experiences do continue to echo long after the uniforms come off, if ever they were worn. As shown by some of the characters in these stories, war does not play by any rules and it is just as often children and women who are the victims, and sometimes a war is not even fought in on a 'proper' battlefield.
There are too many stories to talk about individually and some I found much harder to get into than others. I am not sure I gave them all the proper attention they deserved and reading most of them in one big swallow was also not a good way to approach them. I love short stories but I rarely gulp them. I read one or two a week and think about it and these I tried to squeeze in over the course of a week or so, which is still too fast. So, better to share a few favorites.
The opening story, "The Return of the Baker, Edwin Tregear" tells about a man who once used his hands to make bread, and if you think of bread as being nourishment for living--it is very telling, but went off to war (WWI) and used those same hands to kill. When he returned home it was not exactly as a hero, though he survived. He could no longer bake bread and so instead descended into the bowels of the earth as a miner instead. How far can you go from baking. Mining has its own dangers, just as bad as a battlefield. There is more to this story than Edwin's lose of desire to bake bread. Terrible things, necessary things, things that still require some humanity even while participating in the horrors of war happen and that is Edwin's story.
I was afraid all the stories would be about WWI or WWII, but very few actually center on those conflicts, or they take on a different perspective than normally written about. "The Wig Maker" is a story about comfort women. The wig maker feeling a tangible presence of her mother, now gone, one such woman. I'm not entirely sure which conflict "The Salt Box" even refers to, but the soldiers who come looking for the writings of Valya's grandfather will not find his work in any of the likely places.
"The Ale-Heretic" is about an almost unlikely conflict. Not one you would think of when considering a war story. It's set in England of the 16th century, and it is a world of repression and intolerance. To be burned at the stake for your beliefs is indeed a harrowing thing. When it might take only saying a few meaningless words to save your life. The words are only meaningless to the people who must hear them, but painful to speak to someone who follows his beliefs and tries to stand strong for his faith. An echo of a conflict we no longer thing of in terms of conflict.
My favorite story in the collection is one made up entirely of letters passed between a young Iraqi immigrant and the Queen's deputy secretary of correspondence. It begins as a simple plea for help in replacing pipes that draw water into an apartment in Kilburn. Horrible pipes where the water arrives filled with rust and undrinkable. Karim Hussein is a model of propriety and an earnest young man who only wants a chance to study and a place to live that is clean and safe. Sarah Williams who must reply to the "hundred of letter that arrive every week" has a simple form letter that is the response that is cold and predictable, but as the "correspondence" continues more and more is learned and Sarah is touched by Karim's hopes and dreams. In the space of a very few letters Gebbie manages to tell quite a story that is ultimately heart wrenching in its hopeless conclusion.
These stories do not come with happy endings. They are almost as much impressions of feelings of despair brought by war as proper "this happened and then this happened and then this was the solution" stories. Sometimes there is no resolution, only a revelation of the high price we pay in world conflicts. In most cases there is something so very raw about these stories that it was at times hard reading them. I admire Gebbie's work, but, too, I was happy to turn the page on the last story. This was not comforting reading, necessary reading to be sure however.
Thanks to Caroline for bringing the book to my attention, and her first in a series of books for this year's Literature and War Readalong.