Review by Emily Devane
Jonathan Taylor, Scablands (Salt, 2023)
I first encountered Jonathan Taylor at a Word Factory salon back in 2014, when he read his extraordinarily powerful story, Synaesthetic Schmidt (from the collection Kontakte and Other Stories) and I have since followed his work with interest. His stories land like emotional grenades – each one delivered with surgical precision.
Scablands and Other Stories, Jonathan Taylor’s latest collection, recently won The Arnold Bennett Book Prize, which celebrates writers with links to North Staffordshire. The twenty stories in this latest collection are firmly rooted in the post-industrial scablands. These are richly imagined tales of austerity, migration, addiction, poverty and trauma, told with Taylor’s trademark inventiveness.
The stories range from punchy flash fictions, like the powerful Changelessness, in which a female insomniac experiences the emptiness of being home alone, to the haunting, fragmented Staring Girl. I found the depiction of visiting premature twins in High Dependency, with its use of repetition and lean prose, especially moving:
We ate a lukewarm takeaway. We ignored the phone. It kept ringing, ringing. We picked up the phone and said: ‘Yes, yes, no, no, still no change.’
In this short piece, Taylor captures with extraordinary skill the mundanity of living day to day, all the while on high alert. There’s such poetry in the imagery in lines such as: We reached through holes in an incubator, touched a hand the size and texture of a petal. He is an acute observer of human pain, how we attempt to hide what hurts us, and how we keep circling back to moments of trauma. For example, Bee in the Bonnet, is a tender exploration of a family coping with a past tragedy, while Till Life is a poignant story about a checkout worker, whose days are punctuated by digestive biscuits and confusing encounters with the guilt-stricken ‘tea-cosy lady’. But the scablands aren’t an entirely dark place to be. There is plenty of magic to be found within these stories: the sisters who dream that they can fly, the musician who hoards rare records, the child and teacher who share custard creams while hiding from bullies in the school library.
The characters in Taylor’s stories are those who might be ordinarily overlooked. He is a chameleon of perspective, with a cast of characters exploring people who occupy the liminal spaces of the scablands: the starving woman who decides to sell hugs from an abandoned kiosk; the girl trying to impress her friends by sourcing drugs; the girl skipping college to make some money on the side from a sad, fleece-clad man; and the new boy trying to negotiate the lunchtime battlefield of the playground in the title story, Scablands.
‘I heard your dad was a scab,’ hisses a fifth-year girl. ‘a scab from Scabland – Derby or Nottingham or somewhere shit like that.’
When he encounters Mr Chandler, a relic of a teacher who passes his days hiding in the school library watching cricket and threatening to cane anyone who interrupts, the boy is torn between fear and concern. This, the longest story in the collection, leaves an echo that lingers, about the passing of old values, old jobs, and even old threats. It is about people who hurt each other and who hurt themselves – a theme that weaves through the whole collection.
There is so much to admire here. In Scablands and Other Stories, Taylor demonstrates just how powerful the shortest of stories can be.
Small Like a bullet (3): Word Factory Masterclass
Jonathan Taylor will explore the story High Dependency from this collection in his online Word Factory Masterclass on Tuesday 17 June, 7-8.30pm.
Book tickets here.
Jonathan Taylor’s most recent books are the short story collection Scablands and Other Stories (Salt, 2023), the poetry collection Cassandra Complex (Shoestring Press, 2018), and the memoir A Physical Education: On Bullying, Discipline & Other Lessons(Goldsmiths, 2024). With Karen Stevens, he is co-editor of the award-winning anthology High Spirits: A Round of Drinking Stories (Valley Press, 2018 and 2019). He is director of the MA in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester.
Website: www.jonathanptaylor.co.uk
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Emily Devane is a writer, editor, teacher and bookseller from Ilkley, West Yorkshire. Her short fiction has been widely published in journals such as Smokelong Quarterly, Ambit and The Lonely Crowd. She has won the Bath Flash Fiction Award, a Word Factory Apprenticeship and a Northern Writers’ Award. A former Word Factory Apprentice, Emily teaches creative writing workshops (@wordsmoor), is a guest host at Word Factory’s Strike! Short Story Club and runs regular writing events.
