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Bridport Prize 2006
2006 Short Story Judge - Jane Gardam
After the month of reading the longlist for the Bridport Prize
I have great respect for those who produced it from the initial
4,800 entries. I had only to choose first, second and third prize
and ten supplementary prizes yet the block of MSS that arrived by
special delivery at my door looked a formidable heap.
After a worrying drought, when all the MSS seemed alike and I
feared that a number of authors were attending the same creative
writing class, the desert began to flower and three blossoms
sprang up, one of them I felt sure might deserve the first prize.
Which it won.
Ten runners-up were more difficult. There was a grim uniformity
about the worlds they described. I felt that if I were a Martian
I would not want to continue with any space-probe that might take
me anywhere near planet earth; a place of malaise, disillusion,
infidelity, malice, cowardice, madness, cruelty, marital discord,
damaged children with ghastly parents, drugs, booze, child-abuse,
war, massacre, suicide and scant religious faith or hope for the
future. Humour was in short supply and so was beauty, human or
divine, and there was little comfort or notice of the wonders of
earthly landscape.
However, when I came to disregard subject matter, as I should,
the clouds lifted. It is character that is at the heart of
everything and it is character that is being wrestled with in
most of the stories. I decided to give my judicial self a rest,
live my life and see which of the characters would continue in my
mind.
I will remember the girl in Phantoms, a successful
accountant who lives for facts and logic and suddenly finds that
she has become a compulsive liar inventing for herself and her
arid world a populous, passionate life. I will remember the two
characters in an eastern-European train in Metal, a story
of the holocaust, simply because they live. This author is way
ahead of the field in dialogue. She (I guess she?) knows how to
do it and I wonder if this could be a playwright? And I shall
remember the floundering, ageing woman and her young lover in
Caught because the author sees his/her two main characters
as prisms, considering their possible alternative next steps.
There is a Joycean sense of depth and mystery. Under the
Table's wild and wicked heroine, lost to right and wrong,
streams through the story in her 'pretty car', lost to her
unhappy family. Turtles, set in a quiet London hotel where
lonely ageing men stay the night, has three characters in a cat's
cradle of intrigue and despair - and all of them redeemable.
Me and the Motorway has a dreadful heroine dear to my
heart. She is a vulgar slag, the dregs of 'the north-east' where
I come from. She is none too clean, size 22, living a thoroughly
messy life. Failed daughter, mother, girlfriend, attended by no
guardian angel ever, she has done time in prison and will do so
(quite soon!) again. Yet she is curiously innocent, funny, brave
and constantly astonished by life. The story tells of the day
when the gods decide to give her one great bright glorious treat.
Feeding Time is the portrait of a damaged child, now a
man, who learned of child-abuse within an apparently outgoing,
ordinary family. Disgust has made him crazed and cruel. The story
is his mad monologue before a psychiatrist. It is accomplished,
convincing and horrible. The Sandwich is about a familiar
contemporary type: attractive, devious, irresponsible and
outrageously immature. He is attending the birth of his child.
Terrified and inarticulate he flies from his girlfriend in labour
'to get a sandwich' and doesn't come back. In the background an
all-seeing mother-in-law.
Two on the list do not depend on character but should be
mentioned. They are about cosmic tragedy. Running around
without a god in their hearts has the widowed victim of the
great tsunami taking his young daughter by the hand and
introducing her about their ruined village to all the exponents
of the great religions there who might possibly interest her in
the notion of God. And The Cliffs at Marpi is the
pilgrimage to death of the hundreds of women and children who
threw themselves into the Pacific ocean as the horrified
Americans approached by sea, to occupy their island. This one
might well have won but there are limits to the short story. This
is film or opera.
The three winners.
Glad is an interior monologue of a seventeen-year-old girl
dying in a hospice, attended by her twin sister. Two twigs on a
branch. There is no trace of mawkishness. The sister quietly
paints her sleeping sister's fingernails. A tired, cheap bouquet
she has brought lies on the bed and fades with the girl.
Cold Weather's title is not perhaps strong enough for this
powerful Greek myth of Persephone, the bringer of Spring. This is
a timely tale if, as we are told, the world is careering towards
the end of Light. It was a relief to read the great story again.
It is always new. It was good to be with eagles and not
sparrows.
The first prize, Rue de Vaugirard, stood out from the
start. Its subject is serious: the aftermath of war. It deals
with revenge, racism, insularity. Into the threadbare, scoured
post-war Paris of the late 1940's step three Persephones,
Californian innocents bringing back the Spring. It is their first
time abroad but these bouncing, well-fed babies, full of
idealism, air and space are totally fearless. They have strong
views on everything (At school they were known as intellectuals
because they read novels!) and they descend on a Paris pension
and its terrible Madame as if they own the world. The very smell
of fusty, skint, ruined Paris is here. It is reminiscent of
Katherine Mansfield's In a German Pension, or the Canadian
short story writer, Mavis Gallant, but it is much funnier. Paris
rouses itself, unconquered, before the brave new world but both
are full of energy, argument and fire.
Jane Gardam
 | The Bridport Prize is a fundraiser for Bridport Arts Centre, charity no 1069780 |