Biographical note: Neil Campbell was born in Audenshaw, Manchester in 1973. While working variously as a warehouseman, bookseller and teacher, he had poems and stories published in small press magazines, and now edits Lamport Court. In 1999, at Manchester University, he completed an MA dissertation on the short stories of Raymond Carver, and in 2006 graduated, with a distinction, from the Creative Writing MA at Manchester Metropolitan University. This is his first book.
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EAN13: 9781844713011 ISBN: 9781844713011 Author: Neil Campbell Title: Broken Doll Series: Salt Modern Fiction Product class: BC Language: eng Audience: General/trade BIC subject category: FNB Publisher: Salt Publishing Pub date: 01-Mar-07 Extent: 120pp Height: 203 mm Width: 127 mm Thickness: 7 mm Weight: 180 gms Supplier:Gardners Books Supplier:Ingram Book Group Supplier:Inbooks (James Bennett) Availability: IP Price: GBP 8.99 Price: USD 14.95 Rights: World
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description/annotation: With both economy and compassion, Neil Campbell creates lyrical visions of loss and confinement. Children, teenagers, parents, single men and women all feature in the unflinching depictions of ordinary people coping with the difficulties of everyday life.
Main description: With both economy and compassion, Neil Campbell creates lyrical visions of loss and confinement. Children, teenagers, parents, single men and women all feature in the unflinching depictions of ordinary people coping with the difficulties of everyday life. In stories filled with both poetry and humour, he reveals how moments from both the past and the present can affect our lives forever. From Manchester to Magaluf, Campbell shows lives defined by work and circumstances. The lives of factory workers, labourers, drinkers, musicians, hikers, artists and sportsmen are all revealed in pared-down stories of tact and precision that have a haunting authenticity. In choosing to explore enduring aspects of the human condition he transcends the zeitgeist to leave us with stories that resonate with truth. His crafted stories reveal a sensitivity to the nuances of human behaviour, and suggest a bright future.
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Table of contents: The Orange Football Disappearance of a Sunset Magaluf The Last Post Confined Spaces Retail Therapy All Smiles Saved Why do you Come Here? Broken Doll The Fresher The Faces Marked by the Ringing The Cricket Book Seller Waiting in the Wings The Empty Space The Rooms Between the Zipped Limits Climbing
I’m sitting among the cold rocks of Swirral Edge, looking at Red Tarn through the mist as it disappears and re-appears again at the caprice of the wind. A fat crow flies past with a glow of orange peel in its black mouth, the slowly threshing wings like scissors cutting the air. I came here on my own because I need a break from the relationship I’m in. While my girlfriend is at home, I’m watching hikers crawling around Red Tarn like ants skirting a puddle.
On the summit of Helvellyn a group of boys wearing matching fleeces frowned at me when I asked them for directions. They gave me a compass bearing and I laughed and wandered off through the mist, following cairns that looked like gremlins in the gloom. When the mist cleared I could see the path stretching down below, like white cotton thread on a dropped green sweater.
The whisky from my hip flask warms me, the uncorked malt clothing my throat like a scarf. The fat crow lands with a hush of wings and I pass it a piece of Mars bar.
*
I met Paola outside a student pub in the quiet months of summer. She was talking in Spanish to her friend, and I walked over to listen to their voices. When we spoke it turned out we were both artists. She came from Madrid. I’d just started my own art magazine and was looking for submissions, so she invited me back to her flat.
The portfolio was full of interesting images – collages of lottery and raffle tickets over black and white photographs of historic buildings, a naked man in a cage, a silver ball in a corridor, a painting of a mouse with a tree growing out of its belly.
I looked with interest at the images, but soon became pre-occupied with Paola’s dark brown eyes and black hair, and the way her jeans curved in a tiny c around the small of her light brown back.
We’ve been together for about a year. I don’t think I’m in love with her. When she said she was in love with me I was shocked. I felt the fear of a bad swimmer grasping for the surface, a sickening ache in my stomach located somewhere between tension and sorrow. I couldn’t remember anyone else saying that to me. When Paola asked me if I loved her I said that I wasn’t sure. She became upset, but I didn’t want the relationship to end, so a day or so later I told her that I loved her.
*
Striding Edge is the most breathtaking mountain ridge in the Lake District. One stumble could mean crashing down for thousands of feet on either side of its slippery skyscraper ledge. From Patterdale, an easy walk gradually inclines its way into the Grisedale valley. Then it’s a safe but steep ascent up a rocky track to a grassy plateau, where the timid walker can enjoy a sandwich and a flask of coffee, while looking at the glistening black pond of Red Tarn, bobbing and sloshing beneath the ragged peaks above. I was excited as I made my way across Striding Edge, my heart rate increased as I clung to rocks in the shoving wind and slipped on icy ground in my trainers. My ears stung pink in the ripping air and my hands were swollen with cold and bleeding on grappled-for stone. I felt my bare knees ache and my wet feet sliding inside my lumpy wet socks. The ridge seemed to recede like melting ice beneath my feet, and the sun came in and out like car lights through a garden fence. My shaking legs and fear-filled chest made my scrambling slow, and the silent voids beside me beckoned like the ghosts waiting around the memorial on the mountain’s peak. Tutting hikers, sensibly clothed and wheezing in the breeze, pass me on their way down. As I start descending, the crow floats effortlessly back up to the sky. On the other rim of the circle around Red Tarn, a hesitant procession of black dots moves across Striding Edge. White light flashes like a memory through the clouds. I start running down the mountain, jumping from rock to rock and taking to the air before a slip slides in. I brush past raincoats and woolly hats and leather boots and gloves and scarves and balaclavas and arctic mittens and ski sticks and walking sticks and compasses and maps and flasks and flapjacks and rucksacks. I look back up at them from a stone seat by the tarn and think too long about going for a swim. Descending into the Grisedale valley, I see a farmhouse with smoke curling from its chimney. I sip from my hip flask and speed up beneath the enclosing clouds.
Unpublished endorsement : This writing is economical and scathing, at times almost lyrical. It is very sure writing. It knows inside out the world it describes. The dialogue is note perfect and has a studied, savage banality. The prose revels in the outrageousness of the things that people say, and is true to its characters throughout. There’s a saddening bravado in these voices.
Paul Magrs
Unpublished endorsement : Neil Campbell's first book is an astonishingly assured debut. His resonant stories are richly loaded with the sounds and rhythms of life as we experience it from day to day. His characters, like those of Chekhov or Raymond Carver, reveal themselves to us through the gradual accretion of plausible action, thought and feeling. Everyone who takes contemporary fiction seriously will want to read and re-read this book.
Andrew Biswell
Unpublished endorsement : Of the many people working to keep the short story alive, Neil Campbell is doing so simply by writing excellent stories. His fiction makes us see things anew, like a page refresh of the world around us.
Nicholas Royle
Review quote: The collection works in a strange, cumulative fashion to draw the reader into Neil Campbell’s chosen world … read it because it is an excellent first collection.
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