How many people realise that these words refer to the work of a fellow SoF member, Wendy Perriam?
Wendy’s latest book, Laughter Class and Other Stories, fully deserves the kind of critical praise just quoted. As usual, it contains some trademark elements of sex, religion and humour. Above all, though, it seems to me these stories are a heartfelt plea for love, and a warning of the damage and despair that can result from the lack of it.
Many of Wendy Perriam’s characters have suffered emotional damage caused by the people closest to them, often the parents. We watch with growing horror as neglect or its opposite, smothering control, corrode the characters’ lives, destroying happiness and feelings of self worth. A daughter dismisses herself as ‘superfluous’ after her mother leaves her father to live with another man. A grown son chokes on his food as he remembers the lash of his father’s belt. In ‘Grapes of Wrath’ we read of Eileen: ‘Deprived of mother’s milk, she had been forced to feed on the world, biting into its tough volcanic crust, gagging on rocks and soil’.
The use of food to mirror states of mind is typical Perriam. Whether as a substitute for love or a means of control, food spills lavishly through these pages, with all its smells, good and bad, its textures and flavours. Food nurtures, woos, reconciles, repels. A character’s relationship with food tells us nearly all we need to know. For Laura, a failed dieter, the whole cheeses, French pastries, cartons of ice cream and Butter Crinkle are her children, ‘her new friends ready to comfort and sustain her’. For Laura, the need to offer sustenance extends, comically and tragically, to her moving into a garden shed where she is free to continue to feed the tribes of mice she insists on caring for.
Freedom, from control, inhibition, social conventions and norms, is another of Wendy Perriam’s concerns. So what if the ‘caring’ daughter wants her mother safely tucked into her soulless, sheltered accommodation?
Mum makes a run for it, hitching a lift to Inverness as she’s always dreamed of doing. Though she bears the same name, Rosemary isn’t Kenneth’s (only) ex-girl friend, she’s a dog, but to Kenneth she’s a passport to freedom, away from the safe, hated job and the parents who allow no pets, and no music but hymns.
Which brings us to religion. SoFers who know Wendy Perriam’s work will be asking where religion fits into this current collection. The answer is, the references are subtle and multi-facetted.
When associated with repressive backgrounds, religion here can be guilt-inducing and inhibiting.
But in ‘Matthew, Mark, Luke and’ the saints are the only comfort left to the elderly arthritic woman dying alone in her room: ‘Imaginary was an ambiguous word. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John seemed actually more substantial than the few fleshand-blood people still remaining in her life… Dawn would never break for her, morning never come. But her Guardians had returned… stepping forward to claim her soul, escort it through the long eternal night’. Who could quarrel with such a picture?
You will have gathered by now that Wendy Perriam doesn’t do moderation. Her characters are driven by desperate needs, which demand resolution. In some cases this involves healing and reconciliation, in others the neurosis can only be soothed through the power of fantasy. When their situation is too harsh to bear, losers can invent other, better realities for themselves in which they are successful, attractive, loved. As these stories show, the results may be uncomfortable for the rest of us. But then, who is to judge what reality ought to be?
Anthea Boulton reviews Laughter Class and Other Stories by Wendy Perriam Robert Hale (London). 2006. £18.99. ISBN 0709081073 reviews In my own pretty puritan religious upbringing, the Ten Commandments with their bans and taboos, reinforced with threats of judgement held me in thrall (albeit reluctantly) to imageless monotheism for decades. Now I reckon the invasion of Canaan by the Israelites with its Yahweh/Law Covenant-driven command to destroy the blasphemous religions they found there was a tragedy of colossal proportions.
Review of Laughter Class and Other Stories by Wendy Perriam, Robert Hale (London). 2006. £18.99. ISBN 0709081073.