Short Fiction Corner | The Grinding House by Kaaron Warren

Do you remember the Good Old Days?

"They were good. People cared about each other. Wealthy governments gave money to poor countries. You could go to the doctor even if you didn't have money to pay. The government would pay. And they'd help you if you couldn't find a job. Not throw you in jail."

Not so much nowadays. Nowadays, the sad fact is that "no one gives a shit about anyone. [..] People are dying of hunger and deprivations," and all anyone seems to care about - according to the gospel of The Grinding House - is Slenderize, "the complete weight-loss-mental-health programme. It's even got an anti-cancer agent in there."

Why wouldn't you want some of that action?

As it happens, there's at least one good reason - one very good reason - but I'll leave that for you folks to find out in your own time. As well you should: Kaaron Warren is such a powerful purveyor of the weird and the wonderful as to practically alarm, and her 2005 novella The Grinding House is, I think, among her very finest fictions.

Disturbing and disarming in equal parts, The Grinding House is the twisted tale of four friends - the brothers Nick and Rab; Sasha, the woman everyone wants; and Bevan, the odd man out - four friends and sometime lovers who escape to an abandoned almond grove in the countryside when an apocalyptic plague sweeps through the city.

I'll say they don't all make it.

"This is what happens. First the feet feel stiff and the heels sore. You can't bend your toes. Then your ankles feel stiff. It is worse overnight. You wake up in pain. As you walk you feel the bones crackle. Like walking on eggshells. Your fingers, too. You can't move your fingers. [...] You know then that you don't have long. [...] Your neck stiffens. Your groin feels painful. When you walk, it is like your pelvis is mortar and your spine a pestle, grinding, grinding."

It's harrowing stuff, this. Mercifully short, but bitterly, brilliantly beautiful; a fusion of intensity and intimacy so gnarled together as to appear inseparable. Warren wends effortlessly from moments of churning, repulsive horror to episodes abbreviated from some lyrical escapist fable. In quick succession The Grinding House put me in mind of The Pesthouse by Jim Crace, the work of Sam Taylor - specifically The Republic of Trees - and of course Warren's own Walking the Tree.

In the erstwhile Warren builds her characters cannily - not necessarily pleasant characters, but they are no less authentic for that - without seeming for a single solitary second to do so, and ultimately delivers deathblows so sudden and shocking as to appall. I was, for my part, quite beside myself by the end.

The Grinding House is experimental horror of highest order: a harrowing vegetarian fable - and what of it? - more affecting in just a few thousand words than most full length novels aspire to be in their entirely.

But I expect the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Thus, dear readers, I bid you: eat, and be well!

Or unwell, as the case may be...

***

The Grinding House is available now as a Kindle Single, priced to move, from the folks at 40k Books, or as part of Dead Sea Fruit, Ticondera Publishing's 2010 collection of this alarmingly talented Aussie author's sterling short fiction.

Go now, and gorge. :)

The Scotsman Abroad | Mistificationing

Some will come, and some will go; as it is, so shall it ever be... and that's just dandy! It's the way of the world, and I suppose it's only proper that the internet should follow suit.

Nonetheless, those that remain are my favourite folks of all, and among you - yes you - a few might recall that I rather sang Kaaron Warren's praises last year, for the weird wonder that was Walking the Tree. 'Twas a timeless sort of tale; smart and emotional, haunting even, and fully-formed for all its sparsity.

Now I hadn't read Kaaron's debut at the time -- and though I still haven't reviewed it, I have had occasion to peruse and very much approve of Slights since. It's a very different sort of novel than I'd imagined, but a remarkable and remarkably thoughtful piece of work for all that it roundly outmanoeuvred my expectations.

But back on point: I came to Kaaron's latest novel, Mistification, knowing enough about the author to know not to expect anything expectable. Which was just as well, really, because Mistification as different from Walking the Tree in its way as Walking the Tree was from Slights. Think Paul Auster's Mr Vertigo meets The Orphan's Tales by Catherynne M. Valente, if you must think of it in such terms.

What I discovered in Mistification left me in two minds, in any event:

"Mistification begins marvellously, austere and mysterious, and it ends on a truly grand conjuration laden with emotional resonance. Warren saves her best trick for the encore performance, and it sounds out a note of such tremendous follow-through, finally, that judged only on its first and last acts, Mistification could be among the year's most powerful dark fantasies. The trouble is in the between-times, which only ever feel like between-times..." 

The full review is over at Strange Horizons. 

If you're at all interested in "the latest from one of Australia's most daring voices whether within or without the boundaries of genre literature" - and however mixed my feelings about Mistification are, understand that assuredly you should be - I'd recommend you click on through to read the thing in full.

Book Review: Walking the Tree by Kaaron Warren

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"Botanica is the island, but all of Botanica is taken up by the Tree.

"Lillah has come of age. She is now ready to leave her community and walk around the Tree for five years, learning all that Botanica has to teach her. Before setting off, Lillah is begged by the dying mother of a young boy to take him with her. But if anyone suspects he carries the disease himself, he and Lillah will be killed."

***

It would be doing Walking the Tree a disservice to say, as I imagine many critics may, that it is a novel about what it is to be a woman. Criminally underappreciated Australian author Kaaron Warren certainly has much to say about the concept of femininity as we understand it, but her thematic concerns are substantially more diverse than that reductive description allows for. Walking the Tree is, firstly, a novel about discovery; about community, truth and history, amongst other things. Its concerns range far and wide, and though gender is among them, threaded finely through a narrative that takes place over the course of nearly a decade in the life of Lillah, who leaves her village a girl and returns an adult, the notion never overbears on the darkly fantastic tale Warren has to tell.

Botanica is a beautifully realised setting: an island dominated by a great tree, the circumference of which takes five years to traverse and around whose roots various Orders have sprung up. Every one of these communities in microcosm is unique; each produces a different thing, be it Jasmine-scented perfume, pottery or morning-after moss; each has its own array of fears and beliefs, each its own, individual story to tell; each reacts differently to Lillah and the school of children she and her fellow teachers accompany on their mind-widening pilgrimage around the tree. As they come to grasp the myriad differences between their home in Ombu and the handful of other Orders, so too do we.

The further Lillah progresses in her journey, the greater the reader's understanding of Botanica becomes; spread before us, as it is before her, lies the island in all its glory - and all its horror. For not all of the Orders dotted around the outer rim of Botanica are as welcoming to teachers and their schools as the people of Ombu. Among the communities there are those that clearly despise the intrusion, though while some only tolerate the tradition, others revel in it. In one Order, Lillah and her class of innocents are met with ceremony and reverence; in another, the resentment only relents to make room for the advances of lecherous men.

In terms of storytelling, Walking the Tree is a fairly straightforward read, but Warren's almost detached tone belies a startling blackness at the heart of her narrative. Lillah encounters the best of Botanica during her pilgrimage, but she must also face up to the worst. There is sickening brutality throughout: rape, intimidation, sheer, stark terror and tragedy. When leaffall claims the life of one teacher, the others exchange glances which say "We are glad it isn't one of us. This wasn't a good teacher. She did not deserve to die, but we are glad it is her and not one of us," and such bittersweet insight, such honesty, is commonplace throughout Warren's revelatory second novel. Her matter-of-fact voice communicates the tale's darker turns as effectively as it does the rare interludes of light.

Beyond a disarmingly frank desire to experience intercourse for the first time - for in Botanica, woman cannot couple with men from their own community - Lillah begins her journey in the abstract, but her pilgrimage soon becomes deeply personal. In one Order she picks up the trail of her absent mother; in another, far-fetched tales of her father's brother spark her imagination; and always, Marcus is with her: Marcus, a child who may or may not carry a sickness that could decimate the island's already-sparse populace.

Unbidden, Lillah's journey begins to affect her, and us, in turn. As her sibling observes, "we are all changed by even the smallest experience. We cannot stay the same no matter how hard we try," and as Lillah's trip around the tree becomes more emotional, the reader's stakes are engendered so that when she and her charges are imperiled, our sympathies are with them. But neither Warren nor her protagonist cast judgment on the other cultures, not even the most awful of them: Walking the Tree is progressive in many ways, but it treads lightly, respectful always, and for its restraint, the narrative is all the more successful.

Walking the Tree is an unpretentious, eye-opening experience. Dark but never dim, Karron Warren's first novel since she documented the psyche of a serial killer in her debut Slights is an insightful, earthy chronicle of diversity and understandings arrived at and remade. Hers is a voice that demands to be heard, and I don't doubt that this marvelous fable represents only the root of her talents.

***

Walking the Tree

by Kaaron Warren

February 2010, Angry Robot

Buy this book from
Amazon.co.uk / Amazon.com /
The Book Depository

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