Barbelith Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing > 2007: What are you currently reading?

Reading Kate Pullinger's My Life As A Girl In A Men's Prison, which despite the racy title, is a fairly random collection of stories, some of which clearly stemmed from her stint as writer in residence at HMP Garstree and some which have evidently been lying around in the bottom drawer for ages.

She was my tutor, and given the appalling impression I got of her taste and abilities as a critic/reader over the semester, I can't honestly say I wanted or expected to like this book, but I was certainly willing to. The first, long story (about a Canadian boy on his gap year who keeps knocking up his girlfriends) is merely all right, nicely evocative in an 80s nostalgia kind of way, but all the rest so far, even when they have interesting premises (homeless woman seduced by cabbie vampire) are very meuh.
In fact, she's coming across to me more and more as a very meuh writer - one who is hard to love, or to hate, or to get especially worked up about in any way.

I've read one of her novels, Weird Sister, and although it did boast one decent character (a crippled ex-policeman slightly ripped off Mr. Rochester) and again, although it passed the time, it did make me wonder why she'd written it, and what the point of it was. It wasn't a story that burned to be told, or even a terribly good or original one. (The ending also sucked). I wonder if she's classified as "literary fiction" - given the workmanlike quality of her prose I assume not, but then again, her work doesn't have the compulsive readability of a lot of popular fiction, chick-lit etc., and her subjects are definitely not shagging and shopping (except in a poverty-stricken, grimy-underbelly kind of way).

I guess what I failed to give was a shit about any of the characters, and what the stories really lacked was vividness and imagination - something that James Meek's excellent collection, The Museum of Doubt is bursting at the seams with. I can very much recommend this book (his best-known novel is The People's Act of Love) and it uses the short story in a variety of interesting and unusual ways - as a dream narrative, a Pandora's Box/Arabian Knights introduction, an exploration of murder and time travel, and plenty more. Meek has energy and daring, and while you may not always like the stories in the book, you certainly won't be languidly indifferent.

There's surreal imagination overflowing the pages, full of real get-your-teeth-into-it prose with an odd (idiomatic/Scottish?) poetic twist - unlike Pullinger, you might not trust Meek to babysit your children, but at least if you let him tell them a bedtime story they won't die of meuh.