In the title story of this playfully devastating debut collection, longlisted for the Guardian first book award, three old friends on a fishing trip find themselves inexplicably lost at sea in a small rubber lifeboat. Trying to frame their misadventure as a pitch for a TV show, Dan offers Phil and Ross an outlandish premise involving a coup in Canada and kamikaze beluga whales which he titles Man v Nature. “Everything is man versus this and man versus that. It’s so simple,” he explains. “It’s man versus everything. It’s me. It’s you. It’s us. It’s in us.” Phil objects that it should be called Man v Man. And sure enough, throughout this tale of physical peril and existential dread, the most lethal narrative charge resides in the flickering aggressions and emotional connections between the three men: who never got asked on sleepovers as a kid, who kissed whose wife or wanted to, which man – crushed up against his dying peers in a tiny boat against a backdrop of ultimate blankness – feels excluded from the usual currents of warmth and friendship.
This is the trick of Diane Cook’s stories: against high-concept dystopias that belong in the realm of SF or fairytale or parable – the last two houses standing in a world of rising sea levels; a man blessed and cursed with the power to impregnate any woman; a society that incinerates a certain number of “not-needed boys” – they amplify the emotional states and subconscious forces that drive everyday life, such as grief, shame, desire and need. There is a tinge of George Saunders in the way she treads the margins between the hyperreal and the surreal, but the stories have an imaginative dexterity all their own.
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