André Mangeot

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Biographical note:  André Mangeot lives and works in Cambridge. He has published two well-received poetry collections: Natural Causes (Shoestring, 2003) and Mixer (Egg Box, 2005) and is a member of the performance group, The Joy of Six. His first book of short stories A Little Javanese (Salt, 2008) was praised as “a fantastic collection: ambitious, moving and beautifully written” … “gripping and atmospheric”.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844718283
ISBN:  9781844718283
Author:  André Mangeot
Title:  True North
Series:  Salt Modern Fiction
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  FA
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  08-Oct-10
Extent:  176pp
Height:  198 mm
Width:  129 mm
Thickness:  12.32 mm
Weight:  264 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  NP
Price:  GBP 8.99
Price:  USD 14.95
Rights:  World

Short description/annotation:  Seven stories set in seven different countries – by a prizewinning poet who is also emerging as a talented writer of fiction. Set in Romania, Miami, the Sahara, Thailand, France, Indonesia and Canada, they expose human frailty in its many forms but suggest that humanity has more that binds us together than separates us.

Main description:  In keeping with his powerful first collection, A Little Javanese, these seven new stories by André Mangeot roam the globe, exposing human frailty in its many forms. In central Europe a wayward son takes up the reins of the family business; a journalist heads into the Sahara in search of her past; a retired Canadian teacher is forced to question much he has believed …

Flood, heat, desert and snowscape are here almost characters in themselves – edging certain stories to their climax, elsewhere simply observing how we humans write our own stories and endings.

Played out against the grinding poverty of street children, in drug fuelled Miami bars and alleys, amongst the detritus of a deserted Thai beach or in the complex world of musical genius – we are witnesses to love, betrayal, self-delusion, the nature of hope and loyalty.

These compelling and beautifully crafted stories show us that humanity has more that binds us together than separates us. That action and consequences all have a cost and that truth and lies are sometimes only divided by a heartbeat.

Table of contents:
Rain
Monkey Knife Fight
Tajine with Madonna
Borderline
The Wood Yard
The Never-Still and the Stars
True North

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Excerpt from book:  

Rain

He’d spent the morning deep in the Carpathian forests, feeling like a god. The air was pure, so clear it felt eternal; and this was his kingdom.

Radu, his guide from the sawmill, might have read his mind.

‘See — straight to heaven!’ he called across the clearing, slapping his palm against a ninety-foot pine. Another perfect column, soaring out of sight in their mountain-side cathedral. Shafts of sunlight arrowed back from the canopy as if through stained glass. Lucas scuffed at the soft floor of needles with his boot, watched the dust-motes dancing with colour.

He’d asked Radu to bring him up here, past Magiresti, to see for himself the extent of McAllister’s holding.

‘There — the white hills,’ Radu pointed. Over the Tazlau river, far below. Up across the valley to distant ridges of beech, oak, spruce, silver fir. A vivid necklace — gleaming facets of green, copper, gold — circling the peaks still frosted with snow.

‘All of it? Are you sure?’

He’d seen photos, memorised the map, but out here the sheer scale — trees, ravines, mountains — was astounding.

‘Of course,’ Radu answered, checking his watch. ‘Come, is time we go back.’

Lucas had rarely felt so alive. Everything held an
electric clarity. Some trip, he reflected, inhaling the rarified air. The best trip ever.



§


The concept of delegation had always been alien to his father. Still, it was clear to Lucas that thirty-four years at the helm had, increasingly, played tricks with John McAllister’s reason. Had nurtured, through lack of challenge, a sense of inviolability; the illusion that he alone was the company, indispensable to its success.

No one could dispute his father’s capacity for work, his utter dedication to the business. Without his vision, energy and self-belief the modest joinery business he’d inherited from his father, John senior, would never have flourished as it had.

Growing up, Lucas and his mother saw little of him as a result. He was always abroad or in the City. (As a child Lucas imagined this must be Nottingham, just up the road and the only city he knew). His father was off raising funds, along with his profile. On the scent of ailing rivals, vulnerable balance-sheets. In time Lucas came to resent even his brief appearances, the token attempts at bonding. Painful hours repairing a bicycle tyre; barked reprimands at another failed tackle; fending off leg-breaks bowled through a low and blinding sun — these were just a stranger’s intrusion into self-imagined worlds he already much preferred.

Little wonder, then, that ‘succession planning’ was something his father resisted, avoided speaking of, for as long as possible. Partly down to arrogance, but also because Lucas showed no inclination to follow him. And since there was no clear alternative, the status quo prevailed. Approaching seventy but still in rude health, the boss soldiered on. Expansion continued apace. McAllister acquired further forests, mills, timber yards. The numbers not only made sense, they were startling. Investors liked what they saw. Profits soared.

Lucas, now a young man, pursued different paths, dreams, girls. None, in his father’s eyes, were suitable — but that was largely the point. At fourteen, a junior squash champion and talented cricketer too, Lucas had toyed with the idea of professional sport. By seventeen though, it had all gone to pot — quite literally. After several warnings, suspensions and plummeting grades he and two friends were finally expelled from their West Country boarding school for dealing dope to fellow Sixth Formers. Lucas had stumbled on the enterprise by chance in the local pub, where he and other final-year students were allowed for a weekend pint. The swift conversion of product into cash (which funded the best CD collection in school) was too simple to ignore.

His mother — forever supportive in the wake of each paternal blast meted out on her son — did her best to rescue something positive. At one point, bless her, Lucas recalled her suggesting that he’d ‘at least displayed initiative,’ a budding if misguided flair. But this cut no ice with her husband. One swift telephone call to an ex-army colleague in Skye was enough to banish Lucas into exile with the clear imperative: here the party ends. Time to examine yourself, sonny. Where you are heading.

Major Savage more than lived up to his name. His daily regime was draconian: a lung- and back-breaking mix of assault course, peat-cutting and unrelenting discipline. Shape up or ship out. Within a week, lying in the bleak little croft, aching head-to-toe from his latest exertions as the wind moaned outside, Lucas’s mind was, indeed, fully focused.

It was there that it came to him — what his rebellion, such as it was, was about. If he wanted to accumulate anything it was experience, not wealth. Money, above all, had nurtured the distance between him and his father. Not simply the time it took to make it, its costs and demands, but the money itself. Doled out more in apology, a substitute for warmth or embrace. Understanding this, Lucas underwent a strange but sincere transformation. Realised it was how one approached things — one’s own state of mind, not the thing itself — that mattered. Much to his own astonishment he awoke the next morning resolved to make a go of it. Father and son. Learning the trade. He saw now that experience was everywhere, including McAllister’s. The rest was what you made of it.

It took close to six months for his father to believe in the change, to entrust him with anything approaching a meaningful task. But from there, month by month, Lucas could sense him gradually loosening the reins, ceding some authority. They still found it difficult to talk, to touch on anything of emotional depth, but at least they were trying. It was progress. Lucas began to take a special interest in the supply chain, their land and holdings abroad, eastern Europe in particular.

As if his stars and planets had shifted into happier alignment, it was soon after this that Suzie entered his life. From across the marquee at his schoolmate Dougie’s wedding reception. Flying into his arms at the ceilidh — spinning and laughing in a dance that neither wished to escape from. Nor had they. Four months later they were engaged. Everyone — his parents included — adored her. Now, a year on, they were closing in on those same vows themselves. Just twenty-two days. He was counting off each one.


§


Thinking of her, Lucas pulled out his phone and hit speed-dial. How cool was this, to talk to her from up here! — The McAllister outpost. Part of their future.

For a moment there was nothing. No sound bar the flap and settle of rooks overhead, the light crunch of their footsteps as Radu led on through the trees, steeply down. Lucas was conscious of the ache in his knees and with a smile imagined Savage berating him, appalled how unfit he’d become. C’mon, he muttered into the phone. But just as he assumed the ridges, the dense woods around them, were screwing with the signal, here was her voice, magically clear.

‘Luke? — is that you? Jesus! How’s it going, baby? Where are you?’

He heard the chatter of children behind her, a corridor echo. Mid-morning break. Could picture her, pile of books beneath an arm, phone in the other, hurrying to the staff-room.

‘You won’t believe what I’m seeing, Suze. This view. God, I wish you were here …’

‘Me too, you know that.’

‘We’ll do it. Soon, I promise.’

‘What about the meeting? Have you seen him yet’

‘That’s at 2:00. We’re heading there now.’

‘Well, stay cool, honey.’

His father had warned him about Marin, the factory manager; that he needed firm handling.

Don’t try to be his friend — you’re not. Ask what he needs and he’ll take that as weakness. Just tell him what’s required …

Quality control appeared to be waning. The level of finish: wardrobes, tables, dressers. Lucas came armed with an ultimatum. Any returns from Marin’s next shipment, McAllister’s would take its business elsewhere. This was leverage, too, for other concessions. Swifter delivery, lower costs. The usual squeeze. Only this time he, Lucas, was ringmaster, running the show. He had no doubt he could do it. It was simply hard to believe still, after all that had gone before. To find himself in this position.

‘Better go,’ he was saying, ‘we’re almost at the car …’

‘Ok … but you be careful.’

‘C’mon, sweetheart, relax. It’s Romania, not Afghanistan.’

Suzie fretted, it was part of her nature. More than once recently he’d dreamt of a bird, hovering just above him, beating its wings in a protective fan. Sometimes he woke convinced it was her, but said nothing. Before the fog of dementia began to absorb his mother, she had been equally protective. Then Suzie had appeared, right on cue, as if stepping into her shoes. In this regard, at least, he’d sought to discourage it. He was his own man now. And though to date he’d kept it to himself, part of him was needled by what her anxiety implied — that at some level he remained vulnerable, naïve, exposed, in particular once they were apart. Lucas loved her to a fault, but still. He knew one thing: he didn’t need a new protector, any kind of surrogate parent.

‘Miss you, Luke.’ Her voice was so close he could sense her, all but smell the scent on her neck.

‘You too,’ he replied. He could see the 4x4 now. Past Radu’s shoulder, fifty metres ahead: a silver gleam at the roadside. ‘Love you loads. And don’t worry, I’ll be fine. See you Wednesday, huh?’

Previous review quote:  There is a cosmopolitan breadth to Andre Mangeot’s stories that gives them exceptional range and cultural richness. These layered narratives are fraught with the eruption of memory, the complications of the past, with encounters that grow taut through misunderstanding and darkly ensuing consequence. Few writers would dare to mix historical and fictional characters as he does in the title story and few could write from the viewpoint of other cultures with such sensitivity and interior authority. His subjects are beautifully observed and his style has technique equal to their variety and emotional scale.

Graham Mort

Previous review quote:  These stories are pacy, eventful, sometimes violent, their settings unusually varied and colourful but they nevertheless remain grounded in real human experience, so that we can believe in the characters and recognise their dilemmas. A disturbingly unpredictable world emerges, populated by isolated individuals who can only guess at one another's motives.

Chris Beckett

Previous review quote:  In plain, uncluttered prose, these stories illuminate pivotal moments in their characters’ lives. Their yearning for escape and flight speaks of a deep-rooted psychological unease which the protagonists’ themselves—although not the author—are unable, or unwilling, to explore.

Colette Paul

Previous review quote:  Intertwines the personal and the political with terrific skill … a fantastic collection: ambitious, moving and beautifully written.

Joe Dunthorne

Previous review quote:  With a meticulous sense of place, Andre Mangeot presents a series of characters caught between worlds, on the cusp of change, between life and death. His stories are gripping and atmospheric, full of impending doom and unexpected redemptions.

Sarah Bower