Publishing Company Blog | The Boy Who Could See Death review – pearls from Salley Vickers’s little box of tricks

The Boy Who Could See Death review – pearls from Salley Vickers’s little box of tricks

Written By Unknown on Sunday, April 5, 2015 | 5:18 AM

The writer and psychoanalyst’s latest collection of short stories reveals her as a master of sleight of hand

The most satisfying short stories rely on sleight of hand. As a reader, one looks but does not see until, at the end, everything one thought true must be assessed in a new light. Salley Vickers has mastered this art to perfection and effortlessly – sometimes deviously – conjures surprises. It is more than a matter of form. One of the pleasures of reading her is in her calm generalisations that tend to startle: “Any potential tragedy has an element of excitement about it.” “Good marriages are not always based on mutual understanding.” “Of course, all sentimentalists are sadists.” There is no “of course” about any of it. But there is a link between these pronouncements: Vickers’s inclination is to set the cat among the pigeons.

In her introduction, she explains that the stories were inspired by real places and friends – the late Deborah Rogers (not Vickers’s literary agent but a “dear friend”) is the inspiration for the disruptively enjoyable “Rescue” in which death involves an unwelcome rewriting of history. Vickers shared a “forensic and sometimes fantastical view of human nature” with Rogers, and in the opening story, “The Churchyard”, extends her forensic eye to nature. The story was inspired by a cottage – renamed Quince cottage – near Stratford-upon-Avon. A woman, recently separated, considers the rural scene in pleasingly exact detail. She notices that male blackbirds have “yellow bills assertively forward”. She longs to spot a barn owl as she once did with her absent man. She envies a heron whose heart cannot be broken. She then refines this to: “Paltered with. Worse than broken.” Paltered (to trifle with, or equivocate), first cousin to faltered, is a word I now plan to adopt. Vickers’s vocabulary is choice though never pretentiously rarefied. And at Quince cottage, the woman then settles down to the television news: “The violence and prevailing gloom were palliatives to a savaged breast.” It is another shocker of a passing thought because it rings true.