J is for Ten Sorry Tales by Mick Jackson

 I could cheat on this post, because I wrote a review of this book here some time ago. Wow, it's a good book! Feel free to check out the link, I'll wait...

Goodreads

Are you back? Good.

I love this book because it shows how easy it is to create strange - really peculiar - characters and still draw your audience in. Most of my characters are rooted to the real world; I hesitate to write this kind of larger-than-life weirdness because I worry about making them believable. I worry that readers will throw their hands up in despair that I haven't taken the time to make them more sympathetic and real.

Of course, Ten Sorry Tales is a collection of short stories, and I know from experience it's much easier within a short story to dump your reader in an odd situation with odd characters and never have to actually explain yourself. What made me laugh is that the things I adore in this book are the very same things that people on Goodreads have disliked.

I've tried to make some of the characters in my current WIP slightly more abstract - it's a novel at the moment, but who knows what it will end up as. I've got a man who likes to write all over his body, and a woman who's so shy she practically disappears into the soft furnishings. They may or may not work in the environment I've put them in, but I've got the confidence to try.

Ten Sorry Tales by Mick Jackson: a review

I don't often review books on here. There are many reasons for that, not least because I don't often get round to buying new books (as my Wish List on Amazon will testify), and there are much better reviewers out there than me. However, sometimes I'm so excited/moved/fascinated by a book, I just have to leap up and down and tell you all about it.

This particular book - Ten Sorry Tales by Mick Jackson - is one of those books. It was first published in 2005, so you may have already read it. It's a collection of ten short stories, and they are so surreal and Roald Dahl-esque that I had to Google Mick Jackson to find out whether I was actually reading a children's book. As it turns out, it's perfect for both adults and children - I found my copy in the Adult section of the library.

Last night I read two of the stories. The Lepidoctor is about a boy who collects very strange things, and happens across a Victorian lepidoctor's equipment. A lepidoctor, if you don't know, is someone who resurrects butterflies, which is fortuitous as there's a new butterfly exhibit in the local museum.

Hermit Wanted is about a wealthy couple who discover a cave on their vast estate and decide to employ a hermit to occupy it.

Both of these are charming and heartwarming stories, albeit in a slightly macabre way. I haven't finished all the stories yet - each one needs to be read and savoured, much like a really good box of Belgian chocolates. The whole book is a perfect example of how you can take a perfectly reasonable and tangible idea, but expand it beyond reality, just a little. Which inevitably makes you think that perhaps there really is a bored pensioner sitting in his newly-built rowing boat, paddling back and forth in his flooded cellar (A Row-Boat in the Cellar).