In George Saunders’ luminously perceptive meditation on lessons learned from the Russian masters, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, he suggests a short story should “always be escalating”; that it must ideally adhere to a “ruthless efficiency principle”. Jo Lloyd’s debut collection The Earth, Thy Great Exchequer, Ready Lies demonstrates that stories can be compelling in other ways. They can be gestational, digressive, subtly allusive: more a patchwork quilt than a grid-iron system.
These qualities are on show in “The Invisible”, winner of the 2019 BBC National short story award, a fabular, fragmentary tale set in 18th-century Wales, in which new wealth destroys a community. Inspired by an entry in the Dictionary of Welsh Biography, it tells of a Caernarvonshire woman who claims that she knows of an invisible family in an invisible mansion. Narrated in the first-person plural, the story’s “we” eventually becomes the voice of the proletariat, delivering an allegory of envy and inequality, where unobserved riches become intolerable in the imagination.
Another historical tale, “My Bonny”, uses the same fractured style, building up a picture of generations descended from a drowned mariner. Intricately woven, nesting stories within stories, it memorialises those who died unremembered along the treacherous Welsh coast, using startling imagery. The sailor’s cousin envisions his sinking ship “like an overturned cathedral” as it “plummeted into glacial blackness”.
Elsewhere, contemporary quotidian tales are juxtaposed with myth. In “The Ground the Deck”, provincial Megan moves into a London flatshare with worldly Licia and Xander, only to be given an education in how small inconsiderate gestures can be devastating to those “below us” – literally in Megan’s case, with her treatment of the couple downstairs.
In “The Butterflies of the Balkans”, ageing Dottie and Prue travel the Dalmatian coast and interior in 1905, passing themselves off as “scientists … researching the Lepidoptera”. Deaf, with “some mischievous artist … taking an eraser to her vision”, Dottie knows the trip is a last, life-affirming apprehension of existence: “One day the whole glittering world would fade.” Lyrical, weightless, elusive as the butterflies in Dottie’s net, this story is one of the best in the collection.
While there are occasionally jarring tonal shifts between the chatty, reader-addressing voice of the modern stories and the wise, dispassionate narrators of the historical tales, Lloyd’s crisp prose rings clear throughout. The theme of class divisions returns in the daringly structured title story about a 17th-century mercantile adventurer. Episodic, with many ellipses, it is neither efficient nor escalating, but gains its power from its undocumented stretches of time: “Years pass, then centuries. Wars are fought, empires spread and contract … The world is changed utterly.” Readers are allowed to put together the jigsaw for themselves.
• Jude Cook’s novel Jacob’s Advice is published by Unbound. The Earth, Thy Great Exchequer, Ready Lies by Jo Lloyd is published by Swift (£12.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
