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Bridport Prize 20042004 Short Story Judge - Jim Crace This year the Bridport Prize for the best short story attracted more than 4000 entries, including some by newcomers, who given the effort, the chance and the good fortune, could well establish themselves as successful, published writers. That's the dream, isn't it?, whenever we submit our Jiffy bags of fiction to valuable and important competitions such as the Bridport, or e-mail our newly finished novel to a publishing house, or chance our arm with a literary agent picked randomly from the Writers' and Artists' Year Book. To make our writing public is to seek validation, not only for the prize money, of course (though that's always welcome, even if the cheque is merely framed as evidence) and not only for the prospect of a little notoriety. No, the purest dream is just to see ourselves in print, to have what we have discovered, felt and imagined and then laboured to express as perfectly as possible set up in black and white and in the hands of strangers. We dream of being published, being purchased, being read. We do not dream of storing all our efforts in bottom drawers, along with those rejection slips. So it is a chilling but not necessarily a sad fact, that out of those 4000 plus Bridport hopefuls only fifty or so -that's one in eighty- displayed enough of the ambition and risk-taking that make for publishable, prize-winning fiction. But that is no cause for dismay and no reason at all for any of the less successful entrants to throw in the towel. How can it be anything but impressive and cheering when, in this spoon-fed age of television in which we are all encouraged to receive rather than transmit stories, that so many new, inexperienced, hesitant writers who might perhaps never see their names in print were nevertheless keen to test their instinctive narrative muscles by sitting alone for a day or so of imaginative introspection? The least successful stories -like the less tended gardens- are never without interest or beauty. Their readers might not encounter the perfect balance of depth and clarity, the finest of metaphors or the most mesmerising of plots, but there is nearly always sincerity and a charming, unguarded openness which can reveal as much about the way we see ourselves and our predicaments as some Great Works. In other words, even the least of the 4000 is worthy of respect and attention. If it's nearly impossible to write the perfect short story, then it's also pretty damned hard to write a very blemished one. All but 13 writers will regret not winning a prize, not achieving the dream on this occasion, but I am sure that there is not a single unsuccessful entrant who would prefer never to have completed their story. Human beings are by nature narrative animals with unparalleled language skills and consciousness, both of which will atrophy if not exercised. The writing is reward in itself. Besides, there are other stories, other prizes, other chances. It's back to work for Bridport 2005. But what of the "fifty or so"? I read them and reread them this summer on the cliffs and beaches of the Isles of Scilly hunting for the winners amongst the wind-ripped manuscripts. I had not expected to encounter so many dysfunctional families or so much unembarrassed eroticism or such a high degree of psychiatric disorder or quite so many weird distortions of the everyday - sprouting duvets, ship-filled streets, an all-too-human wolf. If these fifty stories could be taken as fifty snap shots of Our Times, then the world would seem a very troubled, isolating, dispiriting and sexually active place indeed. So unlike the Isles of Scilly! But that is as it should be, of course. Narrative is drawn to the cracks and blemishes. "Happiness writes white," according to the essayist, Montherlant. We turn to fiction for the greys and darker tones. The finest of stories expose us to -and so prepare us for- the fear, the failure, the despair. And love gone wrong, of course. And death. The best of these fifty stories, then, for me, were those which were the most testing and the most threatening, and which displayed their seriousness of purpose and their writerly achievement by taking the most narrative risks - the awkward, ugly, violent grief of Alan McCormick's Howl, for instance, or Meredith Andrew's atmospheric and original response to post 9/11 America, or the wistful, loving heartlessness of The Peppermint Room and the eloquence of clocks and ferris wheels in Third Prize winner, Maura's Arm by Emma Darwin. In the end there was a tussle for first and second prize, the US versus Oz. Both Dorene O'Brien's #12 Dagwood on Rye and Janey Runci's The Visit are very fine stories indeed, the first an entirely convincing, slow-burning, complicated tale of depression, medication and anxiety, the second an unblinking, compassionate and uncomfortable account of how we let ourselves and our parents down when they are too old to help themselves and we are old enough to know better. Finally, it was the odder story of the two which took First Prize. Oddness has its strengths, in literature at least. Congratulations then to Dorene O'Brien, and to the other dozen prize winners who were the brightest but not the only points of light and inspiration in this constellation of 4000 stars.
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