Book review: We Are Attempting to Survive by A L Kennedy

When even survival is something to be terrified of

The Evening Standard's journalism is supported by our readers. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.

Claire Allfree9 April 2020

No, A L Kennedy’s new short stories are not dispatches from the Covid-19 crisis, despite the title. Reading them, though, you might find yourself wishing they were.

A tale about the trials of finding an available supermarket delivery date or the challenge of another day spent in the house with your four-year-old might at least offer a smidgen of light relief from the human wreckage Kennedy, above, serves up here, in a collection startling for its refusal to indulge the redemptive possibilities of narrative.

This is Kennedy’s seventh short story anthology and it shows her brutally in command of the form. She’s also a mistress of the deceptively disarming opening sentence: “Hi, my name is Phoebe,” is the bright beginning of New Mexico, a slow- burning horror about a serial killer. “You don’t know when he’s home, so that’s a problem,” is the casually confessional opener of It Might be Easier to Fail, an unhinged revenge tragedy. These stories (nearly all first person) begin full of air and light, the reader eased into feelings of chummy confidence. By their end you feel engulfed by a clammy net, unable to escape.

Here, then, are ordinary people improvising functional lives in the face of indelible experience.

A new bride walks along the sea, contemplating the unspeakable lie of her marriage, since the only man she was aware of during the ceremony was her father, an ominous presence “with his button fly... sitting tight beside my mother”. “It will be terrible, this surviving,” thinks the woman in Am Sonntag, whose family has vanished in an unnamed apocalypse.

Memory is baked into the clay of Kennedy’s characters, each of whom is unable to escape the truth of their lives, just like the bomb-damaged buildings in Unanswered, whose narrator, we slowly realise, contains the nightmare of the Holocaust inside his very bones. Seemingly artless yet ruthlessly focused, these really are stories from the brink.

We Are Attempting to Survive by A L Kennedy (Cape, £16.99), buy it here.