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Mo Fanning

This short story in monologue form has been cleverly worked out so that only very gradually do we come to realise the situation which exists between the narrator (if that is a reasonable way to describe the character whose memories and plans and thoughts we share) and the son, and the nature of the party which the mother is arranging. I greatly admire the economy with which you reveal how and why the son is coming home. Indeed, you are very successful throughout in giving your readers a minimum of solid facts, yet sufficient for them to understand fully the character of this woman and what sort of life she lives; we can visualise her social background, know what sort of marriage she had, and appreciate the intensity of her relationship with her son; and there is no hint of condescension or judgment of any kind. In doing all this you have made good use of the pleasure that readers find in working things out for themselves and painting a fairly detailed picture from the skeletal information that they are given.

I think you have also judged very well how long you can continue with the build-up of character and situation before you get to the main turning point of the story (the fact that the young man is in prison) and then to the subtle revelation of his crime and its nature, and finally to the equally understated suicide. As a result, the reader’s interest is maintained and encouraged.

However, if you are going to write a story of this kind which leads your readers up the garden path by making them (in this case) believe that the party is a celebration rather than a wake, you have to play fair, and I must say that I think you cheat a little. This is when you say “I suppose you didn’t plan on coming home this weekend” and “I still have no idea what time you’re planning on getting here”. I realise that your intention is to show that Mary has not come to terms with the fact that her son is dead, but the words you have chosen have the strong implication that the son is alive. I would suggest that you get rid of the whole idea that he had done any planning about coming home. In the first case it might work to say “A bit of notice might have been nice, but you were always rather unpredictable.” and in the second case “I’ve still no idea when you’ll get here.” No doubt you will be able to improve on those suggestions.

The writing itself is pretty good – you obviously care for words and know how to use them, and it’s a pleasure to read the work of someone who does not find grammar, punctuation and spelling impenetrable mysteries. You capture Mary’s tone of voice very well (and of course I am referring to the whole piece, and not just the few lines of direct dialogue that you include). However, I wonder whether you have read the piece aloud. If you did so, I think you might notice that the rhythm of the prose is rather obtrusive. This is because you use so many short sentences, which are all basically constructed in a similar pattern. That may be exactly how Mary thinks or speaks to herself, but I just wished that occasionally you would link some of thoughts into a more complex sentence. Moreover, although her mind flits from subject to subject, each paragraph is a parcel, as it were, with all its contents being relevant to a single theme, and this effect is somehow emphasised by those short sentences, meaning that again there is a lack of variety. Mary doesn’t ever ramble, as I think she should – I am not suggesting that you should allow her to go into a full-scale stream-of-consciousness mode, but that her thoughts should be a little less controlled than they seem to be at the moment.

(You might, by the way, try reading the above paragraph aloud. It is not a chunk that I have worked on in order to give it great variety, but you will see that the sentences have different shapes and rhythms. Even the three short sentences just about manage to escape being obtrusive, and they are completely saved by the more complex sentence which follows).

Your beginning and ending device worries me. In the first place I am bothered because I think “bash” is a most unlikely word for Mary to use – I feel that it doesn’t belong to her generation or her social background – surely she would be more likely to call it a “do”. Much more importantly, I don’t think the repetition of the paragraph really works. It seems very contrived, and it means that you as the author become intrusive, as though there is a subtext of you saying “Isn’t that a neat way to frame the story and round it off!”. If you still want to use this frame, its artificiality would be a little more acceptable if the paragraph at the end were not an exact repetition. I would suggest adding something on the lines of : “That’ll show them. I don’t care what they think. He’s my boy, and I love him and I always will.” (More short sentences!). But the best thing in my opinion would be to delete the opening couple of lines and start straight off with “I’m so glad your friends have said they’ll come.”

A couple of minor points. In regard to the vol-au-vents, shouldn’t father say that they tasted like cardboard cases filled with wallpaper paste? Surely he would pour scorn on the pastry as well as the filling. And when thinking about her son’s crime and the girl, Mary uses “mom” which sounds and is American – “mam” is common in the north and in Wales, but I don’t think “mom” is used anywhere in Britain.

I have been wondering what you are going to do with these stories. I suppose, if there were enough of them, you could make them into a book-length typescript for submission to publishers, but some of them at least would have to be much longer than Home, which I reckon is well under 2,500 words. I suppose the possibility exists of selling them as individual short stories, but I am not sure where they would find a market, and I would think you would only succeed if you could persuade some magazine to take them all and publish them in following issues so that they could say something like “This month Mo Fanning delves into the mind of…”. And for such use they would probably need to be exactly the same length so that they always fitted into the slot available for them.

The best outlet for them would probably be radio or television, but there you would be up against the memory of Alan Bennett’s wonderful Talking Heads series, to which your work bears more than a passing similarity. Bennett is held in such high esteem these days that some people might think it a great cheek on your part to use his approach. On the other hand, perhaps it would work in your favour – I could imagine your sketches being announced on radio as “brilliant character studies by a very talented author in the style of Alan Bennett and his Talking Heads”.

Anyway, best wishes, and thanks for giving me some work which was interesting and a pleasure to read.

Thank you kindly, we've passed on your thanks to Michael.