2012 – Hitting Trees with Sticks – Jane Rogers

Hitting Trees with Sticks – Jane Rogers

Comma Press – 2012

“Remember, red enters the eye more quickly than any other colour.”

In the opening story of Hitting Trees with Sticks, the main character runs sewing classes for a charity in Africa and teaches women to sew bedspreads out of several rectangles of cloth. This collection, Jane Rogers’ first after several novels, brings together twenty short stories, some previously published, others new, and it reads very much like a patchwork; a set of twenty pieces of cloth of different shape, colour and size stitched together. All these pieces of cloth are cut from the same fabric: Rogers’ fertile and eclectic imagination.

Diverse is the first word that comes to mind to describe this collection and its wide range of genres, tones, situations and settings. But this is not to say that Hitting Trees with Sticks is loosely constructed or incoherent as, beyond the significant differences between the stories lies a set of common motifs: loss, secret, guilt and disenchantment, each time tackled from a fresh perspective.

Guilt serves as an introductory theme into the collection, with the opening story “Red Enters the Eye.” Julie is a young British volunteer on her way to Uganda where she will teach sewing in a refuge for women. Enthusiastic about it, feeling like “she was really going to make a difference,” she quickly realises that the situation there is far more complicated than she could expect, and is confronted with the not-so-cheerful camp leaders, whose “dull and careful rules” she resents and eventually breaks. Once she has challenged the “dreary school-room atmosphere,” the classes are much friendlier and run much more smoothly. And yet, as the text comes to its harsh and inevitable ending, Julie is brought to accept that these rules, as patronising as they seemed, were vital to the security of the camp.

The following story, “Conception” marks a radical shift in tone and setting, taking us into an English kitchen, where a girl asks her mother about where she was conceived. As the woman recalls the memory of the Holiday Cottage where it happened, she understands that the truth will have to be slightly distorted for her daughter: “she was interested in the place her own life had begun, not in the messy intricacies of ours.” The mother and her then partner found themselves in a house that bore the painful remnants of a happy family life that was no more, owned by a man whose family had left; an empty home for abandoned toys, neglected pets, and a “defeated-looking black Labrador.” Looking back at the scene, and finding it a not very suitable place for a child to be conceived, the mother warps her story into a more acceptable and embellished version to answer her daughter: “The owners had two toddlers and a beautiful baby, and a whole menagerie of pets. The place was full of life. It clinched something – we both knew we really wanted you.”

The narrator of “Conception” belongs to a series of lonely female characters in the collection who are somehow affected by traumas from the past or by lingering wounds. Failed or failing relationships are one such example. In “Saved,” cutting through rotten apples to save the best bits helps the main character deal with the frailty of her relationship: “She imagined slicing Vince out of her system like this, like a surgeon removing a tumour.” The young narrator in “The Disaster Equation,” finds it impossible to believe that a man being genuinely kind to her can be something else than a sexist attempt at controlling and dominating her. “The Runaway” is about a woman who, as she waits for her young abusive partner, muses over the loneliness of her home:

She tried to think of the painter whose work it would be; the anemones made it difficult, they were too extreme. Subtract the anemones, and it could be Hopper. Whose rooms do wait; whose everything waits: street corners, beaches, expanses of sea through doorways – waiting, with a desolate and expectant kind of dread, and a knowledge that the waiting will go unanswered.

Most characters in the collection find themselves facing situations where memories which they thought were safely buried come back to life all too vividly. For example in “You Want,” the narrator, snow-bound in France, is forced to stay in a hotel where he is insidiously sent back to a past encounter he had there: “Within its cramped confines his mind, like a captive worm, sensed the aperture and began a long slow delicious extension towards and though it, escaping into memory.” The animal-based imagery reappears in “The Runaway,” when the main character reflects on her past and suddenly sees her thoughts materialise, springing out of her “like a young horse leaping a gate;” the embodiment of her wild, repressed self, followed by a surreal scene staging an exchange between the woman and her equine alter-ego.

Such hints of fantasy are not unusual in this collection, and they are often integrated into the banality of everyday life. “Ped-o-Matique” relates the uncanny experience of an academic who gets trapped in a foot massaging machine, while “A Ghost in the Corner” is about exactly what the title says. As an architect is working late in her office, she gets more and more impatient with the presence of a ghost squatting in the corner of the room. At first ignoring him (“I must have ignored him for a while, or avoided looking at him, naturally hoping he’d go away. Usually when you ignore men, they do”), she eventually engages conversation with him to get him to leave the place: “you’re interrupting my work. And I need that corner for storage.” The woman’s impatience, the ghost’s passive and disorientated attitude and the matter-of-fact delivery of the story make it an original and entertaining one but also draw attention to the message beneath its quirky surface.

While such stories manage to be both serious in matter and light in treatment, a few others are worth reading simply for the literary playfulness they display. “The Tale of a Naked Man” is one of them; the plot is paper-thin and the characters have very little substance as the whole structure of this humorous story is directed towards the closing lines, in a clever and unexpected metafictional twist ending.

This is a well-written, engaging and highly enjoyable collection, but amongst such a diversity of subjects and styles, it is inevitable that some pieces should stand out more than others. “Morphogenesis” is without a doubt one of these outstanding stories, in which Rogers beautifully captures snapshots of the life of scientist Alan Turing. The story starts as he is just a child, and already fascinated with the connectedness of things:

When the pee has evaporated, it will leave that little ridged circle in the dust, which it has turned to mud. Like a volcano crater. It was part of him, that pee.  Cells from inside him will be left there in the mud. And when it dries completely, and the dust gets blown by the wind, and a speck of dust falls to the ground by this heather plant, and the heather drops a seed which sprouts from that dust which was partly made by his pee, will the heather have his cells in it? Will the honey made by the bee who collects the pollen from the flower that has grown from the pee-dust?

“[I watched] the black swans and pelicans gliding about like they’d been paid to do it.”

What is most striking in “Morphogenesis” is not so much its original subject, but the sheer beauty of the language that Rogers uses to transform scientific jargon into poetic expression. One small example to illustrate this is when Alan becomes aware of the presence of his friend Chris, whom he is passionately in love with: “a moving cohort of intensely dense matter, drawing in all around it through its gravitational pull.” Rogers is at her best here, managing to explain a fairly complex scientific theory by injecting poetry into its language. The story encompasses several significant moments in Turing’s life, from the major scientific breakthroughs that will attract the attention of the government to his untimely death:

The law will not allow him to be the man his own cells tell him he is, so now he will offer those rebel cells the chance of escape, which they will probably prefer, to the chemical restraints recently imposed upon them by HMG. He will try the effects of cyanide upon his system.

Death also happens to be at the heart of the other strongest stories in the collection. One of the longest pieces, “Where are you, Stevie?” is a beautiful reflection on human connectedness as four different women try and cope  with the death of a teenager they were somehow related to. There is Amanda, the sarcastic and bitter estate agent who comes to realise she misjudged the boy and Lisa, Stevie’s girlfriend, who feels guilty for not feeling sad, for being “dried up,” and who tries to “hear” him over the white noise of modern life around her:

Only there’s this continual hum from outside, you know? Traffic, planes, other people’s music, birds singing dogs barking cows farting, this constant background grumble, the whole world’s grumbling and you’re thinking just stop for one minute – if you’ll only stop for one minute so I can hear him.

Constructed around metaphors of hearing (culminating in the moving relationship between Stevie and his deaf neighbour in the last section of the story) and crying, the story gracefully captures the critical moment when death alters the lives of people revolving around the ones who leave. A similar exploration of death is articulated in “Birds of American River,” in which an ill woman retreats to an island and eventually manages to come to terms with her own imminent death:

I watched the sky as one by one then two by two then score on score the summer stars came out, and the good warm whisky soaked through all the little holes in my body, and I felt more unimportant, and everlasting, than I had done for a while.

It is Jane Rogers’ talent in Hitting Trees with Sticks to be equally convincing when she imagines the last days of a troubled scientist, or when she describes an underwater encounter with a nosy barracuda, as when she studies the mind of a woman on the verge of death. Not only does she prove original in her subject matter, she is also sound in the execution of these stories. Her beautiful prose tends to be unadorned and unpretentious, by contrast making her perfectly-distributed poetic imagery all the stronger: “a lazy indentation in the coastline has formed a lagoon, where pelicans and black swans float like toy boats on a mirror.” Sad and funny, tender and desolate all at once, Hitting Trees with Sticks is filled with surprises and damaged but endearing characters; it is an excellent collection, perhaps best appreciated when savoured little by little, leaving time for every story to fully settle in the reader’s mind.

More information on the book on Jane Rogers’ website and on the Comma Press website.

Hitting Trees with Sticks has been longlisted for the 2013 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and the Edge Hill Short Story Prize 2013.

Picture credits: 1. by shaire productions – Flickr / 2. by lecates – Flickr

Tags: Edge Hill Short Story Prize, Frank O'Connor Prize, Hitting Trees with Sticks, Jane Rogers