reviews of the half-life of songs
_Times Literary Supplement
David Gaffney is the author of a novel, Never Never, and of three collections of very short stories. His new book, The Half-Life Of Songs, collects fifty-five brief tales in fewer than 200 pages. The longest is twenty-one pages, most are about a page and a half.
One might describe them as squibs, were they not loaded with potent charges, insidious and cumulative in their effects. In Gaffney’s fiction thoughts take physical form, and the material world has a surreal vitality. A prisoner attends to the sounds that buildings make, and when locked up listens to “Not the cacophony of squawks and moans from the prisoners, but the cries of the building itself as people tried to live inside it”. A man hears his house uttering catchphrases from television comedy; the floorboard on the stair says, “Suit you, Sir”, a branch blown against the guttering asks, “What are the scores, George Dawes?”, and water gurgling through the pipes suggests the line, “Don’t tell them, Pike”. A melodeon enthusiast believes that when he plays, he compels the elves inside his instrument to make music. A plumber falls in love with a Frenchwoman who models for art students, and when installing a sink he forms the piping in tribute to her: “Mademoiselle Pelletier would recognise her naked self right away”.
In the longest story, Not Static, a man on holiday in Spain with his wife and two children finds his arm gradually parting company from his shoulder. As the strains in the marriage appear, Noël Coward songs blare out from the next caravan in an ironic counterpoint. Offices, with their rituals and relationships, feature in several stories: a woman gets noticed when a dental anaesthetic alters her normally cheerful expression; another learns the art of alienating her colleagues. The stories are sometimes haunting, and sometimes comic. The half-life is an appropriate metaphor for the lingering effect they have on the reader.
Review of Remaking the Moon from the Half Life Of Songs by David Gaffney
Sept 2015
By Tim Love
The texts in David Gaffney's "The Half-Life of Songs" (Salt, 2010) though short, are clearly stories rather than belonging to a microgenre like anecdote or vignette - they have plots, locations, characters and usually a resolution. My favourite (and according to an interview in Flash Magazine, one of Gaffney's too) is "Remaking the Moon". Straight away with the initial words "Mason's house" we meet the story's only named character, and learn that it's his house rather than a home. Why is the protagonist's name Mason? Masons are makers of walls, but they're also a secretive society, and as we'll see, he's a loner. The house had "no borders of any kind ... so the local historians ... stared through his window at him". He decided to give the local historians something to stare at, playing to the audience. After years of this, someone knocked. Actually, it's a neighbour. Young. Female. Shy - 'No one has paused at my window for a long, long, time' she said. At his suggestion they assembled a jigsaw puzzle of the moon, making one of the onlooking historians happy - 'something had been added to him'. And there the story ends.
When there are fewer than 500 words to play with, inexperienced writers sometimes confuse writing Flash with playing the radio gameshow "Just a Minute", avoiding deviation, repetition or hesitation. In this piece though, the language isn't compressed - "eye" appears 4 times, and there are 6 uses of verbs to do with looking. Nevertheless every detail counts, often counting double, not only being interesting in itself, but also having structural and symbolic duties. Some provide humour - the scenes that Mason presents include lute playing, wrestling with a dummy and finally badger-stuffing. Other details are teasingly symbolic - the oglers "saunter off, trailing their fingers along his brickwork". Standard symbolism is exploited too - House (body), Window (eye, access), Moon (love, sadness), Jigsaw (solving) - but each is repurposed - the house isn't a home, the window is more for people to look in, the moon's a jigsaw, and all the jigsaw's pieces are the same.
Even the title's ready to mean more. It could be treated as a crossword clue - if you remake "the moon" you get "not home". But this isn't a simple puzzle story where readers tick off answers one by one. Why do all the jigsaw pieces look the same? Because then the jigsaw's easy to do? To emphasise that it's just a device they both exploit so that they can stay in each other's company? The historians "streamed" past on the way to sluice gates and flooded mines. Why all the water imagery? To illustrate two ways to deal with emotion - engineered control of the torrential versus subconscious stillness? I don't know. Part of the fun of the story is that there are aspects that don't quite fit, offering readers wiggle room. There's often a partial rationale - the taxidermist's plastic eyes littering the floor at the end contrast with all the earlier staring - but why do the couple make the jigsaw on the floor, kneeling amongst the sawdust and false eyes, rather than on a table?
I've not dealt with what to many readers is its the emotional armature. Gaffney says in the interview that this story's "about lonely people coming together and not really knowing what to do together, so they do a jigsaw". In a Guardian article he suggested that Flash writers should "place the denouement in the middle of the story", which is rather what happens here when the jigsaw comes out of the cupboard, but like the terrorist's 2nd bomb that goes off where crowds are fleeing from the 1st, there's another ending. In the same article he suggested that a Flash story's last line "should leave the reader with something which will continue to sound after the story has finished. It should not complete the story". Why did the final scene make that historian happy? Maybe most of the local historians thought that the jigsaw's just another piece of performance art put on for their entertainment. What did that one special historian lack? Something opposite to his role perhaps - something universal, forward-looking. The moon provides the universality, and the happiness of the couple bodes well for the future. Furthermore we're told the historian's "round-faced", a detail that can't be accidental. Perhaps he sees in the reconstructed moon his face reflected, entire.
Short though it is, the story doesn't seem lacking in any respect. It's defined by what's left out almost as much as by its contents. Nor have I by any means exhausted the piece. There's something for readers of various persuasions. And there are 54 other stories in the book.
Bookmunch
Gaffney’s world is chock a block with odd juxtapositions: whether it’s cross dressing barbers (whose customers ask for a “four denier on the sides and a fun-fur open crotch on the top”), jailbreakers with a curious interest “in the noises a building made” or tramps able to wield shiny metal beetles against anyone who gives them gip, just about all you can reasonably expect from a David Gaffney short-short is, to coin a cliché, the unexpected. Clocking in at over twice the size of his previous collections Sawn-off Tales and Aromabingo, The Half-life Of Songs feels like the book Gaffney’s growing legion of fans have been waiting for. Whereas in the past you might have wished for his stories to stick around a little longer, for his books to not pass quite as quickly as they did, finally, with The Half-life Of Songs you have a book you can relax into. Almost five dozen stories fill the two hundred or so pages of The Half-life Of Songs and, believe you me, they run the gamut: from the “sad funny fables” that Nicholas Clee writes in praise of on the back cover, through to the “hilariously demented and wonderfully succinct… McNuggets of pure gold” that Graham Rawle so favours.
In point of fact, reviewing The Half-life Of Songs is a little tricky because, with so many stories, each of which are cram-packed with twists and turns and chuckles and oddities and mayhem, the last thing you really want to do is unpack them. It wouldn’t be half as much fun if you picked up the book and found yourself going, “Oh, that’s the one Bookmunch spoiled.” So all I will say is…
Any cop?: David Gaffney could well be the king of flash fiction writing right now. If you’ve ever dabbled with Richard Brautigan’s Revenge Of The Lawn or J Robert Lennon’s Pieces For The Left Hand, I’d recommend you make a royal bee-line for Gaffney right about now.
Gutfire Magazine, New York
The clock-cleaning fiction of British writer David Gaffney is definitely best read with protective mouth-guard intact. Equal parts wallop and whimsy, these curt little tales from the other side of the pond will double you with laughter before they sock you in the jaw.
Ailsa Cox (Dept. of English & History, Edge Hill University), Flash Magazine
David Gaffney has established a niche as probably the best known flash fiction writer working in the UK. While there are equally gifted writers in the field - for instance, Dan Rhodes - no one else is so closely identified with the form. The Half-Life Of Songs takes us to what has become familiar Gaffney - territory, everyday northern life, in Manchester or in small towns with high streets where there are still butchers’ shops and barbers struggling to survive. While there is a range of different protagonists, some of them narrating the story in the first person, the voice remains the same, orchestrated by an author with a fondness for hobbyists and enthusiasts, pottering about their allotment, having a go at square dancing, or even, as in The Next Best Thing, collecting Guinness glasses. The richness of the amateurs’ internal lives compensate for their limited ambitions - a statement of pride in the small scale, perhaps even an ironic comment on their author’s own choice of form. In Towns In France Exactly Like This Gaffney shows how a few precise details can evoke a whole era, using an afghan coat and floppy hat to transport us to an art class in 1975; So Much Noise explores urban unease at the ‘weighted silence’ of the countryside. Towns Like France... is one of the many stories in the collection which reference visual art, galleries and museums - an even stronger theme than the musical notes suggested by the title. Gaffney has a gift for balancing the comic with the poignant, and he writes beautiful sentences that stop me in my tracks; look at his description of motorbikes and sidecars in One Thing Deeply. He does however have a weakness for ‘magic realism’, which initially put me off when I read the opening stories. I just don’t buy into the idea of butchers trying to paint their chickens an Irish-themed green (Everything’s Gone Turquoise). Gaffney is at his best when he conjures mysterious, interior worlds from urban space, for instance in Junctions One to Four Were Never Built - when his fancies ring psychologically true.
R
A J Kirby, The Short Review
David Gaffney’s stories are often described as "bite-sized". If that's the case, the size of the bites in this particularly tasty morsel would match the radius of a great white shark's mouth. Perhaps a great white which was about to be lopped in half and pickled in formaldehyde. For in The Half-life Of Songs what we are presented with is a veritable feast. A Heston Blumenthal-style masterclass of the weird and wonderful, the fantastic and the comic. Fifty-five sharky tales which fin their way into the reader's consciousness in a way that many other, more "serious" writers' work could never hope to match.
David Gaffney's stories are also described as the ideal reading for today's audience with our rather under-developed attention spans. They are heralded as fiction to take the iPad generation by their designer hoodies and shake them within an inch of their lives; proclaimed as writing which can compete with the clamour of voices from Twitter and Facebook and Sky Atlantic (Let The Stories Begin). But if Gaffney were an iPhone app, he'd be the 3G one which takes us along McCartney's long and winding road rather than "the shortest possible route". Because there's simply so much to see along the way, he doesn't want us to miss it.
Although nominally a collection of short, flash pieces, The Half-life Of Songs is about far more than that. Here, Gaffney delivers the real Little Britain; a collection of unique snapshots, pen-pictures if you will, of people, not caricatures. He holds an iPhone app mirror up to the society, landscape and culture of Britain and he shows us our foibles, or strange tics, our crazed beliefs and our hidden fears.
This is a pinpoint examination of truth which stands comparison with the best observational comics, and it is also revelation of things we wish were true. Things we wish would make the "And Finally…" section of the local news, such as in The Three Daves, in which a stag do is organised in Pontefract, because Budapest, Paris, Krakow have all been done before: "It was Little Dave's idea to use the stone troughs in the market place [to drink out of] and the president of the Metropolitan Drinking Fountain and Cattle Trough Association was so impressed that Pontefract's troughs would be returned to something like their original use that he gave his blessing right away."
This is absurd, often irreverent humour. In Wooden Animals, a cinema worker observes: "For some reason they liked nun films in Elland (…) Not like Nuns On The Run (…) real nun films, like the Magdalene Sisters. The problem is, they never make enough." It is wild, screaming generalisations which tickle the funny bone, such as "They would smile at Mason in that sarcastic way people with an interest in local history have…" or seeming narrative cul de sacs such as "No one drops in to enquire about industrial breathing equipment on Saturdays…" He imagines up his own literary conundrums. One story is a six paragraph thought-piece on why the protagonist has "Celia's Mum's Rat" as an entry in his mobile phone's phone book.
Along the way, we meet newts, tomato-plants fed on the blood of belly dancers, marmoset-owning fathers, thought-control (and its relationship to PowerPoint), an upturned cereal bowl which acts as a sponge for all arguments (and is later replaced by an electrician who looks like Buddy Holly), a dad whose arm falls off on holiday in Spain. We discover the etiquette of village fireworks displays, swap-shops (swishing), making owl mating calls, and karaoke competitions…
Storywriting 101 class tells us the protagonist must always overcome a problem in a story. And even in as little as 150 words, in some cases, Gaffney's heroes overcome. They overcome problems such as where to buy country clobber when the shop in the high street is boycotted because of a row over what exactly constitutes country music, or "where to get food for a party of 300 on a Sunday afternoon with Greggs shut…" (turns out manages to get ahold of "Irish" themed chickens dyed turquoise by bath bombes).
There is also a rich seam of art themed/inspired stories, including I Liked Everything and Towns In France Exactly Like This. In another, Everlast, Kathleen becomes obsessed with an art installation which is based on Damien Hirst's The Physical Impossibility Of Death In The Mind Of Someone Living. Only here, instead of a shark, we have Pete Doherty cut in half after donating his body to art. After attending a private viewing, Kathleen hides when the rest of the guests go home and then goes to meet her hero: "She threw her arms out sideways and touched both cases, drawing breath sharply. Pete Doherty's body. She was standing between the two halves of Pete Doherty, almost inside him, the closest she'd been to the man, and the only time she'd seen him naked."
Kathleen eventually decides she needs "one last kiss – formaldehyde or no formaldehyde," and uses a break-glass hammer to shatter the glass. To claim him. In this way, the story asks interesting questions about our obsession with celebrity and our ‘ownership' of personalities, but it does it in a way which shows what a horrorshow celebrity has actually become.
Live Feed is my favourite of the art-world stories. It's a piece which Gaffney manages to lampoon both the snooty seriousness of the art exhibition as well as the impotent frustration of the football hooligan all together in this mad, oxymoronic mix which bubbles to the surface as guffawing laughter. With echoes of A Clockwork Orange, the story revolves around an art show being shown live, on big screen inside and outside the White Swan pub in Fallowfield. Jack, our protagonist, is on duty, "policing the live coverage in the community" in order that "if anything serious kicked off" he is on hand.
It is a powder-keg atmosphere. Gaffney renders it perfectly; his language aping the "football hooligan memoir". It is trying to justify nonsense as something important and serious.
"At the actual event it was much easier to control the disorder that always went with these big exhibitions. The Velasquez in Birmingham, the Monet in Sheffield, the Titian in Liverpool, they all ended up the same. Bloodbaths."
And: "...the Chorlton-on-Medlock Watercolour Society were notoriously vicious. Yet the hard core had been flushed out long ago. Guns were off the scene, and the violence had become ritualized – balletic, almost. (…) the fighting was ceremonial."
He meets Jimmy, one of the Chorlton-on-Medlock crew. Jimmy has "a crazy, feral streak, and lacked the normal human aversion to physical violence. Events like this were an excuse to vent the fury he brewed all year".
When the show begins in the decorative arts section, all hell breaks loose. The camera lingers on an Italian Sgabello chair, provoking this response from Jimmy: "A chair? A fucking chair? How exactly is that art? If I want to look at a chair, I'll visit World of fucking Leather. Get this shite off our screens."
And violence is inevitable. But also memorable. The title of this collection, The Half-life… is crucial to understanding the feelings Gaffney leaves with the reader. They resonate. They linger. They invite you back to have another read. Comic writing often gets looked down upon, but Howard Jacobsen won the 2010 Booker with a comic novel, and here Gaffney looks to have cemented his reputation as one of the foremost writers in the short fiction arena. In part by making us laugh.
Alan Cleaver, Whitehaven News
Enter Gaffney world - you won’t be disappointed.
David Gaffney’s latest collection of short stories have been dubbed “fiction for the iPad generation”. And with some of them barely 150 words long, it wouldn’t take much for David to come up with a selection for the Twitter generation as well.
But David argues that a revival of interest in the short-story genre is not necessarily a dumbing-down of society. “Short stories can demand more concentration” said the Cleator Moor born author. “You have got to keep getting back into a new story whereas with a book you can put it down and pick it up again later.”
David manages to cram a richness of detail and character into just a few paragraphs – but it’s what he doesn’t say that leaves the reader to continue his weird and wonderful tales.
The Half-Life Of Songs is crammed full with the humorous, entertaining, unsettling and downright odd. Take the tale where the weird noises made in a flat are not fixed by the council but just tuned in to make more pleasant songs! It conjures up a myriad of possibilities that David leaves for the reader to explore. Or the scented candles with an hallucinogenic aroma that enable users to dream up their darkest fantasies? Where does David get these ideas?
“There are quite a lot of them that are based on real events,” said David, a former Whitehaven Grammar School pupil. “There’s about 25 of them based on a trip I made visiting every town between Hull and Liverpool on the M62.”
The trip was part of an arts project. And he admits that one person has recognised themselves in the tales! There are also a number of the tales based in his home county of Cumbria.
Many of the tales will ring bells with readers: the embarrassing chit-chat from cocktail parties or the excruciatingly painful patter from team-building exercises. David admits he keeps a “little black book” with him in which to jot down his crazy notions to expand later.
“You just kind of know when the short-story has ended,” he explained and added that he may like to take at least one of the short-stories and expand it into a full-length novel. Whether it’s a novel or a short-story, to enter the strange world of Gaffney is a weird and wonderful experience.
The Half-Life of Songs is a delicious way to spend five minutes reading a well-written tale. But, like me, you’ll probably find yourself returning again and again to the stories to explore once more these parallel worlds of the imagination.
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David Gaffney is the author of a novel, Never Never, and of three collections of very short stories. His new book, The Half-Life Of Songs, collects fifty-five brief tales in fewer than 200 pages. The longest is twenty-one pages, most are about a page and a half.
One might describe them as squibs, were they not loaded with potent charges, insidious and cumulative in their effects. In Gaffney’s fiction thoughts take physical form, and the material world has a surreal vitality. A prisoner attends to the sounds that buildings make, and when locked up listens to “Not the cacophony of squawks and moans from the prisoners, but the cries of the building itself as people tried to live inside it”. A man hears his house uttering catchphrases from television comedy; the floorboard on the stair says, “Suit you, Sir”, a branch blown against the guttering asks, “What are the scores, George Dawes?”, and water gurgling through the pipes suggests the line, “Don’t tell them, Pike”. A melodeon enthusiast believes that when he plays, he compels the elves inside his instrument to make music. A plumber falls in love with a Frenchwoman who models for art students, and when installing a sink he forms the piping in tribute to her: “Mademoiselle Pelletier would recognise her naked self right away”.
In the longest story, Not Static, a man on holiday in Spain with his wife and two children finds his arm gradually parting company from his shoulder. As the strains in the marriage appear, Noël Coward songs blare out from the next caravan in an ironic counterpoint. Offices, with their rituals and relationships, feature in several stories: a woman gets noticed when a dental anaesthetic alters her normally cheerful expression; another learns the art of alienating her colleagues. The stories are sometimes haunting, and sometimes comic. The half-life is an appropriate metaphor for the lingering effect they have on the reader.
Review of Remaking the Moon from the Half Life Of Songs by David Gaffney
Sept 2015
By Tim Love
The texts in David Gaffney's "The Half-Life of Songs" (Salt, 2010) though short, are clearly stories rather than belonging to a microgenre like anecdote or vignette - they have plots, locations, characters and usually a resolution. My favourite (and according to an interview in Flash Magazine, one of Gaffney's too) is "Remaking the Moon". Straight away with the initial words "Mason's house" we meet the story's only named character, and learn that it's his house rather than a home. Why is the protagonist's name Mason? Masons are makers of walls, but they're also a secretive society, and as we'll see, he's a loner. The house had "no borders of any kind ... so the local historians ... stared through his window at him". He decided to give the local historians something to stare at, playing to the audience. After years of this, someone knocked. Actually, it's a neighbour. Young. Female. Shy - 'No one has paused at my window for a long, long, time' she said. At his suggestion they assembled a jigsaw puzzle of the moon, making one of the onlooking historians happy - 'something had been added to him'. And there the story ends.
When there are fewer than 500 words to play with, inexperienced writers sometimes confuse writing Flash with playing the radio gameshow "Just a Minute", avoiding deviation, repetition or hesitation. In this piece though, the language isn't compressed - "eye" appears 4 times, and there are 6 uses of verbs to do with looking. Nevertheless every detail counts, often counting double, not only being interesting in itself, but also having structural and symbolic duties. Some provide humour - the scenes that Mason presents include lute playing, wrestling with a dummy and finally badger-stuffing. Other details are teasingly symbolic - the oglers "saunter off, trailing their fingers along his brickwork". Standard symbolism is exploited too - House (body), Window (eye, access), Moon (love, sadness), Jigsaw (solving) - but each is repurposed - the house isn't a home, the window is more for people to look in, the moon's a jigsaw, and all the jigsaw's pieces are the same.
Even the title's ready to mean more. It could be treated as a crossword clue - if you remake "the moon" you get "not home". But this isn't a simple puzzle story where readers tick off answers one by one. Why do all the jigsaw pieces look the same? Because then the jigsaw's easy to do? To emphasise that it's just a device they both exploit so that they can stay in each other's company? The historians "streamed" past on the way to sluice gates and flooded mines. Why all the water imagery? To illustrate two ways to deal with emotion - engineered control of the torrential versus subconscious stillness? I don't know. Part of the fun of the story is that there are aspects that don't quite fit, offering readers wiggle room. There's often a partial rationale - the taxidermist's plastic eyes littering the floor at the end contrast with all the earlier staring - but why do the couple make the jigsaw on the floor, kneeling amongst the sawdust and false eyes, rather than on a table?
I've not dealt with what to many readers is its the emotional armature. Gaffney says in the interview that this story's "about lonely people coming together and not really knowing what to do together, so they do a jigsaw". In a Guardian article he suggested that Flash writers should "place the denouement in the middle of the story", which is rather what happens here when the jigsaw comes out of the cupboard, but like the terrorist's 2nd bomb that goes off where crowds are fleeing from the 1st, there's another ending. In the same article he suggested that a Flash story's last line "should leave the reader with something which will continue to sound after the story has finished. It should not complete the story". Why did the final scene make that historian happy? Maybe most of the local historians thought that the jigsaw's just another piece of performance art put on for their entertainment. What did that one special historian lack? Something opposite to his role perhaps - something universal, forward-looking. The moon provides the universality, and the happiness of the couple bodes well for the future. Furthermore we're told the historian's "round-faced", a detail that can't be accidental. Perhaps he sees in the reconstructed moon his face reflected, entire.
Short though it is, the story doesn't seem lacking in any respect. It's defined by what's left out almost as much as by its contents. Nor have I by any means exhausted the piece. There's something for readers of various persuasions. And there are 54 other stories in the book.
Bookmunch
Gaffney’s world is chock a block with odd juxtapositions: whether it’s cross dressing barbers (whose customers ask for a “four denier on the sides and a fun-fur open crotch on the top”), jailbreakers with a curious interest “in the noises a building made” or tramps able to wield shiny metal beetles against anyone who gives them gip, just about all you can reasonably expect from a David Gaffney short-short is, to coin a cliché, the unexpected. Clocking in at over twice the size of his previous collections Sawn-off Tales and Aromabingo, The Half-life Of Songs feels like the book Gaffney’s growing legion of fans have been waiting for. Whereas in the past you might have wished for his stories to stick around a little longer, for his books to not pass quite as quickly as they did, finally, with The Half-life Of Songs you have a book you can relax into. Almost five dozen stories fill the two hundred or so pages of The Half-life Of Songs and, believe you me, they run the gamut: from the “sad funny fables” that Nicholas Clee writes in praise of on the back cover, through to the “hilariously demented and wonderfully succinct… McNuggets of pure gold” that Graham Rawle so favours.
In point of fact, reviewing The Half-life Of Songs is a little tricky because, with so many stories, each of which are cram-packed with twists and turns and chuckles and oddities and mayhem, the last thing you really want to do is unpack them. It wouldn’t be half as much fun if you picked up the book and found yourself going, “Oh, that’s the one Bookmunch spoiled.” So all I will say is…
Any cop?: David Gaffney could well be the king of flash fiction writing right now. If you’ve ever dabbled with Richard Brautigan’s Revenge Of The Lawn or J Robert Lennon’s Pieces For The Left Hand, I’d recommend you make a royal bee-line for Gaffney right about now.
Gutfire Magazine, New York
The clock-cleaning fiction of British writer David Gaffney is definitely best read with protective mouth-guard intact. Equal parts wallop and whimsy, these curt little tales from the other side of the pond will double you with laughter before they sock you in the jaw.
Ailsa Cox (Dept. of English & History, Edge Hill University), Flash Magazine
David Gaffney has established a niche as probably the best known flash fiction writer working in the UK. While there are equally gifted writers in the field - for instance, Dan Rhodes - no one else is so closely identified with the form. The Half-Life Of Songs takes us to what has become familiar Gaffney - territory, everyday northern life, in Manchester or in small towns with high streets where there are still butchers’ shops and barbers struggling to survive. While there is a range of different protagonists, some of them narrating the story in the first person, the voice remains the same, orchestrated by an author with a fondness for hobbyists and enthusiasts, pottering about their allotment, having a go at square dancing, or even, as in The Next Best Thing, collecting Guinness glasses. The richness of the amateurs’ internal lives compensate for their limited ambitions - a statement of pride in the small scale, perhaps even an ironic comment on their author’s own choice of form. In Towns In France Exactly Like This Gaffney shows how a few precise details can evoke a whole era, using an afghan coat and floppy hat to transport us to an art class in 1975; So Much Noise explores urban unease at the ‘weighted silence’ of the countryside. Towns Like France... is one of the many stories in the collection which reference visual art, galleries and museums - an even stronger theme than the musical notes suggested by the title. Gaffney has a gift for balancing the comic with the poignant, and he writes beautiful sentences that stop me in my tracks; look at his description of motorbikes and sidecars in One Thing Deeply. He does however have a weakness for ‘magic realism’, which initially put me off when I read the opening stories. I just don’t buy into the idea of butchers trying to paint their chickens an Irish-themed green (Everything’s Gone Turquoise). Gaffney is at his best when he conjures mysterious, interior worlds from urban space, for instance in Junctions One to Four Were Never Built - when his fancies ring psychologically true.
R
A J Kirby, The Short Review
David Gaffney’s stories are often described as "bite-sized". If that's the case, the size of the bites in this particularly tasty morsel would match the radius of a great white shark's mouth. Perhaps a great white which was about to be lopped in half and pickled in formaldehyde. For in The Half-life Of Songs what we are presented with is a veritable feast. A Heston Blumenthal-style masterclass of the weird and wonderful, the fantastic and the comic. Fifty-five sharky tales which fin their way into the reader's consciousness in a way that many other, more "serious" writers' work could never hope to match.
David Gaffney's stories are also described as the ideal reading for today's audience with our rather under-developed attention spans. They are heralded as fiction to take the iPad generation by their designer hoodies and shake them within an inch of their lives; proclaimed as writing which can compete with the clamour of voices from Twitter and Facebook and Sky Atlantic (Let The Stories Begin). But if Gaffney were an iPhone app, he'd be the 3G one which takes us along McCartney's long and winding road rather than "the shortest possible route". Because there's simply so much to see along the way, he doesn't want us to miss it.
Although nominally a collection of short, flash pieces, The Half-life Of Songs is about far more than that. Here, Gaffney delivers the real Little Britain; a collection of unique snapshots, pen-pictures if you will, of people, not caricatures. He holds an iPhone app mirror up to the society, landscape and culture of Britain and he shows us our foibles, or strange tics, our crazed beliefs and our hidden fears.
This is a pinpoint examination of truth which stands comparison with the best observational comics, and it is also revelation of things we wish were true. Things we wish would make the "And Finally…" section of the local news, such as in The Three Daves, in which a stag do is organised in Pontefract, because Budapest, Paris, Krakow have all been done before: "It was Little Dave's idea to use the stone troughs in the market place [to drink out of] and the president of the Metropolitan Drinking Fountain and Cattle Trough Association was so impressed that Pontefract's troughs would be returned to something like their original use that he gave his blessing right away."
This is absurd, often irreverent humour. In Wooden Animals, a cinema worker observes: "For some reason they liked nun films in Elland (…) Not like Nuns On The Run (…) real nun films, like the Magdalene Sisters. The problem is, they never make enough." It is wild, screaming generalisations which tickle the funny bone, such as "They would smile at Mason in that sarcastic way people with an interest in local history have…" or seeming narrative cul de sacs such as "No one drops in to enquire about industrial breathing equipment on Saturdays…" He imagines up his own literary conundrums. One story is a six paragraph thought-piece on why the protagonist has "Celia's Mum's Rat" as an entry in his mobile phone's phone book.
Along the way, we meet newts, tomato-plants fed on the blood of belly dancers, marmoset-owning fathers, thought-control (and its relationship to PowerPoint), an upturned cereal bowl which acts as a sponge for all arguments (and is later replaced by an electrician who looks like Buddy Holly), a dad whose arm falls off on holiday in Spain. We discover the etiquette of village fireworks displays, swap-shops (swishing), making owl mating calls, and karaoke competitions…
Storywriting 101 class tells us the protagonist must always overcome a problem in a story. And even in as little as 150 words, in some cases, Gaffney's heroes overcome. They overcome problems such as where to buy country clobber when the shop in the high street is boycotted because of a row over what exactly constitutes country music, or "where to get food for a party of 300 on a Sunday afternoon with Greggs shut…" (turns out manages to get ahold of "Irish" themed chickens dyed turquoise by bath bombes).
There is also a rich seam of art themed/inspired stories, including I Liked Everything and Towns In France Exactly Like This. In another, Everlast, Kathleen becomes obsessed with an art installation which is based on Damien Hirst's The Physical Impossibility Of Death In The Mind Of Someone Living. Only here, instead of a shark, we have Pete Doherty cut in half after donating his body to art. After attending a private viewing, Kathleen hides when the rest of the guests go home and then goes to meet her hero: "She threw her arms out sideways and touched both cases, drawing breath sharply. Pete Doherty's body. She was standing between the two halves of Pete Doherty, almost inside him, the closest she'd been to the man, and the only time she'd seen him naked."
Kathleen eventually decides she needs "one last kiss – formaldehyde or no formaldehyde," and uses a break-glass hammer to shatter the glass. To claim him. In this way, the story asks interesting questions about our obsession with celebrity and our ‘ownership' of personalities, but it does it in a way which shows what a horrorshow celebrity has actually become.
Live Feed is my favourite of the art-world stories. It's a piece which Gaffney manages to lampoon both the snooty seriousness of the art exhibition as well as the impotent frustration of the football hooligan all together in this mad, oxymoronic mix which bubbles to the surface as guffawing laughter. With echoes of A Clockwork Orange, the story revolves around an art show being shown live, on big screen inside and outside the White Swan pub in Fallowfield. Jack, our protagonist, is on duty, "policing the live coverage in the community" in order that "if anything serious kicked off" he is on hand.
It is a powder-keg atmosphere. Gaffney renders it perfectly; his language aping the "football hooligan memoir". It is trying to justify nonsense as something important and serious.
"At the actual event it was much easier to control the disorder that always went with these big exhibitions. The Velasquez in Birmingham, the Monet in Sheffield, the Titian in Liverpool, they all ended up the same. Bloodbaths."
And: "...the Chorlton-on-Medlock Watercolour Society were notoriously vicious. Yet the hard core had been flushed out long ago. Guns were off the scene, and the violence had become ritualized – balletic, almost. (…) the fighting was ceremonial."
He meets Jimmy, one of the Chorlton-on-Medlock crew. Jimmy has "a crazy, feral streak, and lacked the normal human aversion to physical violence. Events like this were an excuse to vent the fury he brewed all year".
When the show begins in the decorative arts section, all hell breaks loose. The camera lingers on an Italian Sgabello chair, provoking this response from Jimmy: "A chair? A fucking chair? How exactly is that art? If I want to look at a chair, I'll visit World of fucking Leather. Get this shite off our screens."
And violence is inevitable. But also memorable. The title of this collection, The Half-life… is crucial to understanding the feelings Gaffney leaves with the reader. They resonate. They linger. They invite you back to have another read. Comic writing often gets looked down upon, but Howard Jacobsen won the 2010 Booker with a comic novel, and here Gaffney looks to have cemented his reputation as one of the foremost writers in the short fiction arena. In part by making us laugh.
Alan Cleaver, Whitehaven News
Enter Gaffney world - you won’t be disappointed.
David Gaffney’s latest collection of short stories have been dubbed “fiction for the iPad generation”. And with some of them barely 150 words long, it wouldn’t take much for David to come up with a selection for the Twitter generation as well.
But David argues that a revival of interest in the short-story genre is not necessarily a dumbing-down of society. “Short stories can demand more concentration” said the Cleator Moor born author. “You have got to keep getting back into a new story whereas with a book you can put it down and pick it up again later.”
David manages to cram a richness of detail and character into just a few paragraphs – but it’s what he doesn’t say that leaves the reader to continue his weird and wonderful tales.
The Half-Life Of Songs is crammed full with the humorous, entertaining, unsettling and downright odd. Take the tale where the weird noises made in a flat are not fixed by the council but just tuned in to make more pleasant songs! It conjures up a myriad of possibilities that David leaves for the reader to explore. Or the scented candles with an hallucinogenic aroma that enable users to dream up their darkest fantasies? Where does David get these ideas?
“There are quite a lot of them that are based on real events,” said David, a former Whitehaven Grammar School pupil. “There’s about 25 of them based on a trip I made visiting every town between Hull and Liverpool on the M62.”
The trip was part of an arts project. And he admits that one person has recognised themselves in the tales! There are also a number of the tales based in his home county of Cumbria.
Many of the tales will ring bells with readers: the embarrassing chit-chat from cocktail parties or the excruciatingly painful patter from team-building exercises. David admits he keeps a “little black book” with him in which to jot down his crazy notions to expand later.
“You just kind of know when the short-story has ended,” he explained and added that he may like to take at least one of the short-stories and expand it into a full-length novel. Whether it’s a novel or a short-story, to enter the strange world of Gaffney is a weird and wonderful experience.
The Half-Life of Songs is a delicious way to spend five minutes reading a well-written tale. But, like me, you’ll probably find yourself returning again and again to the stories to explore once more these parallel worlds of the imagination.
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