A courtroom artist sees the features of her date in the face of a defendant. A woman stranded on the pavement when her office’s automatic doors refuse to open finds her attention drawn to a doppelganger sitting in a restaurant reflected in their glass. A sound editor “oversee[s] … the levels of canned laughter” that are added to audio tracks, and begins to visualise the laughs themselves as physical objects: “meteoric arcs of delicate frost”; butterflies with ragged wings. In Moderate to Poor, Occasionally Good, the latest collection of short stories from Eley Williams, the characters stand athwart the world, leaving only the lightest of impressions (“thoroughly overlookable”, as the woman in Words of Affirmation, who communicates obliquely with her husband via search-engine keywords, puts it), but noticing intently.
These are stories that work from the inside out. Williams has a clear preference for the point-of-view shot: she begins each of her brief, odd tales – none more than a handful of pages long – inside a new character’s head, and allows us to see only what they themselves see, in precisely the way they see it. There is no sense here, as so often in short-story collections, of universe-building. Instead, each of Williams’s stories is intensely subjective: plunging us into a new environment; offering little in the way of orientation. The experience of reading them one after the other is discombobulating, and you get the feeling that this is just the way Williams likes it.
Take Clarity, a tale towards the middle of the collection, which starts from the perspective not of the central character, but of her eye. “Tash’s eye opened,” it begins. “After a minute, it experimented with winking.” As Tash takes in her surroundings, it becomes clear that she knows little more about them than we do. We discover, over several pages and numerous digressions that follow Tash’s wandering thoughts on such matters as the total value of spare change hidden in the country’s sofas, that she is lying on a settee, in a flat, belonging to a mysterious “B”. Helpfully, “B” has left a note; unhelpfully, it raises more questions than it answers. “Sorry about last night,” it reads. “I left a sandwich on the side. Hope you like pickle!” From there, the action spins out of control, slowly at first then with gathering speed. The word “pickle” triggers, in Tash, a linguistic breakdown (“Pickle, what a pickle. Some kind of chutney, was it? A piccalilli (piccalilli, Piccadilly, peccadillo, armadillo”). Unable to wring meaning from the note, Tash reduces the flat to a similar state of disorder. She pours orange juice into a pot plant, then puts the pot plant in the microwave. She puts the remote control into the fish tank. She makes tea in the sink. She ends by leaving B a note, reading only “Dear B”. A scenario that at first seemed odd but explicable devolves into chaos.
Words and symbols are, in fact, the theme that ties this otherwise freewheeling collection together. Williams’s characters are, collectively, fascinated by semiotics; by the chancy, unstable relationships between signifiers and signifieds. Esoteric words (“ventifact and dimity”) are picked out and puzzled over. Onomatopoeic words (“dollop has a pleasing twist of internal symmetry when written down in a recipe”) are a source of delight. Foreign words (“sparagmos”), regional sayings (“Don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining”), legal phrases (“mortmain … refers to a posthumous control exercised by a testator over the uses to which the property is to be applied … But the term literally means dead hand”): the characters attend to them all meticulously, in a bid to bring definition to bear on an alarmingly undisciplined world.
But certainty, in this collection, remains tantalisingly out of reach. In her concise masterpiece of a title story, Williams gives voice to the announcer of the shipping forecast: over the course of the tale, in which the announcer considers the significance of the forecast to her listeners, she conducts a parallel imagined conversation with her partner, and invents characteristics for each of the regions (“Dogger is scandalous, Fisher prosaic”). It becomes clear that the soothing strings of words mean no more to her than they do to most of her landlubber listeners. The story becomes, in the end, a meditation on language’s insufficiency: the tale’s emotional truth is conveyed not through discourse, but via a single image, of a man singing lullabies over a cot “before we no longer needed a nursery”. In these glancing, intriguing stories, Williams is careful never to offer neat endings, or pat solutions: their meaning is something we’re left to construct for ourselves.
• Moderate to Poor, Occasionally Good by Eley Williams is published by 4th Estate (£16.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
