The Review of Music for the Off-Key: Twelve Macabre Short Stories by Courttia Newland
by Marianne Szlyk
I found that the stories in Music for the Off-Key were worth reading in more than one way. At first I was carried along by the plot. More than once, I finished my first reading with a sharp gasp at the quick, cruel turn of events. The first story, “Suicide Note,” was particularly striking because I was not yet used to Newland’s approach and I had begun to warm up to the protagonist, P. Welling, a charming but abusive Londoner.
The story, moreover, begins in a realistic register in which “hot water cascaded from shiny metal taps. . . [and] steam rose, swirled, made the air around him hot and moist” (9). It is true that his grooming paraphernalia includes a razor with which he intends to slit his wrists, but the arc of the story appears to rise from this low point. After all, we first meet Odysseus sobbing on the beach when he believes that he is trapped on Calypso’s island. After all, Welling’s lover Corelle does return, and he may be ready to deal with his attraction to under-age girls. Yet all is not what it seems or what the reader expects in this world, which makes “Suicide Note” an especially effective beginning to Music for the Off-Key.
Other stories are no less surprising, although they take place in settings where one expects violent turns of events. I could imagine an Americanized version of “Sound of the Drums” or “The Great White Hate” on one of the rapper Guru’s Jazzamatazz albums with their bluntly-cut slices of life in Brooklyn. The second story in the collection, “Double Room,” is set in a mysterious luxury hotel where the desk clerk, Serena, pursues a young man who appears to be a female CEO’s plaything. “Gold,” the third story, concerns the baffling dynamic between Laramie, a homeless Black man, and Blaine, a jewellery store clerk. She befriends him, even to the point of bringing him to her apartment, but then throws him out when she learns that he has stolen some rings, a crime for which she had lost her job. Laramie then returns to the streets where he and his dog, Styler, become the victims of random violence. Also intriguing is “The Child Who Wished,” a story about Ebi, an African child who, knowing little or no English, becomes the victim of bullies but then avenges himself. Even when Newland’s stories end in redemption or release, as in “Flight of Freedom” or “Healing Hands,” their endings shock and startle.
A second way of reading the stories is through the characters. They are simultaneously inscrutable yet sympathetic, inviting the reader’s scrutiny yet resisting simple categorization. Welling, of course, fascinated me. Similarly, I returned to “The Child Who Wished” in order to revisit the last image of Ebi “his brow furrowed, concentrating on Fox with all the might that he possessed” (93). Ebi is a sturdy, sympathetic child, and when he fights back against the bullies who attack him, I want him to fight them off. However, I wonder, when he glares at Fox after Lance’s sudden death whether he has become a bully himself. Indeed, he calls Fox, a mixed-race child, a “curiosity” more than once. This complexity also appears in stories that are more slice of life and less plot-driven. Even though “All Crew”’s Barray is unable to resist or even analyze his desire to avenge his best friend’s murder, he is still very much aware of the effect that he has had on his teenaged sister, Lauren, who bullies her younger siblings, denying them milk for their cereal. I would add that, for the most part, Newland’s female characters seem more mysterious than his male characters, perhaps with the exception of “Double Room”’s Serena or “All Crew”’s Lauren. Even after a rereading of these stories, I do wonder what Blaine sees in Larimer, and certainly Welling could be more suspicious of Corelle when she returns to him.
A third way of reading the stories is through their settings. These are very much British stories. A boy is killed on the High Street rather than on Main Street or a parkway. A young man isolates himself in his flat rather than in his apartment. Dialogue is also important to the stories and may be a barrier if you are not used to working-class British accents. I must admit that reading “All Crew” and Suzanne’s dialogue in “Suicide Note” became a little easier after I had listened to Lily Allen’s cockney-accented music a few times. Newland’s Britain is also part of the globalized world. Ebi has just arrived from Africa to live with his mother. Not improbably, his father is working in America, and just as he had in Nigeria, Ebi has eba and egusi soup for dinner. In another story, “Smile, Mannequin Smile,” the British protagonist lived in Japan after having left her hippie husband and graduated from art school. As a result, this country and its culture represents emotional and erotic freedom for her, in turn motivating her actions. Many of the characters belong to what is known as youth culture. This blend of local specificity and global inclusiveness has become more and more common, and now when it appears to be absent, one remarks on this as I realize every time my husband joins me at my parents’ in Maine. Music for the Off-Key, being a product of this blend of the local and the global, draws on it to create a world that is not limited to realism’s register and, for this reason, continues to be fresh and intriguing.
Music for the Off-Key: Twelve Macabre Short Stories
by Courttia Newland.
Leeds, UK: Peepal Tree, 2006. £8.99
Originally published on Potomac Review. Repoduced here with permission.
