{"id":2520,"date":"2013-11-25T16:32:59","date_gmt":"2013-11-25T15:32:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/?p=2520"},"modified":"2014-06-24T17:59:44","modified_gmt":"2014-06-24T16:59:44","slug":"review-the-peacock-cloak-by-chris-beckett","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/?p=2520","title":{"rendered":"REVIEW: THE PEACOCK CLOAK BY CHRIS BECKETT"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Peacock-Cloak-cover\"<\/a>The thing that I like best about Chris Beckett\u2019s short stories in general, and this new collection, The Peacock Cloak<\/i>, in particular is the rage that is bubbling under the surface and that occasionally erupts from the page.<\/p>\n

Not all the stories grip you by the throat, \u201cAtomic Truth\u201d, the first in this collection, is a story in which a young woman reaches a moment of epiphany while brushing briefly against the life of a man with mental illness in a near future London. There\u2019s little enough going on the surface, but underneath there\u2019s a sense of something deeply wrong.<\/p>\n

Other stories are more straightforwardly furious. In \u201cJohnny\u2019s New Job\u201d Beckett, a trained social worker, rips into the way we use public servants as scapegoats, turning the way we burden them with impossible expectations while denying them the resources necessary to do their jobs into a bitter little near-future parable of witch-hunting turned into way of life. In \u201cGreenland\u201d, disastrous global warming and the desperation of those being exploited as illegal immigrants in a near future United Kingdom intersect and lead the protagonist to disaster. Environmental disaster raises its head again in \u201cRat Island\u201d, where the fragility of the immersed, distracted society glimpsed in \u201cAtomic Truth\u201d[ref]And in the earlier \u201cPiccadilly Circus\u201d – collected in The Turing Test[\/ref]<\/em>\u00a0is revealed and a father, a senior civil servant, burdens his son with a truth he himself cannot face. And then there\u2019s \u201cOur Land\u201d \u2013 in which Beckett uses inter-dimensional slipperiness to turn England into an ersatz Palestine, where \u201creturning\u201d Celts have displaced the “native English”, establishing settlements and inciting hatred and violence.<\/p>\n

This book has a tough act to follow. Beckett\u2019s last short story collection, The Turing Test<\/i> (2008) won him the Edge Hill Prize \u2013 beating works by a number of much-lauded \u201cliterary\u201d authors. The standard here is not quite that high, I think, though that\u2019s not to suggest that this is a weak collection. It contains some excellent stories but also a few that felt familiar. \u201cTwo Thieves\u201d is a tale of greed bringing hapless explorers low, \u201cThe Caramel Forest\u201d has a young girl seeking escape from domestic troubles on an alien planet and in \u201cThe Peacock Cloak\u201d a virtual god meets his maker.<\/p>\n

There are, however, far more stories that bristle and seethe. For me the stand-outs are the previously mentioned \u201cAtomic Truth\u201d, \u201cThe Desiccated Man\u201d \u2013 in which a greedy, misanthropic spaceman does something vile and fails to understand his sin \u2013 and \u201cThe Famous Cave Paintings on Isolus 9\u201d in which Beckett comes closest to channelling the existential terror that is sometimes found in the work of the American author with whom he is most often compare: Philip K Dick.<\/p>\n

Taken as a whole, a reader with a weak constitution might find that there\u2019s a certain grimness running through Beckett\u2019s work in this collection. There\u2019s precious little hope, not much joy and no chance of redemption. But that, I think, would be to miss the point. Chris Beckett is an angry writer and we should be grateful for it.<\/p>\n

The Peacock Cloak<\/em> by Chris Beckett (NewCon Press, 2013)
\nThis review was originally published in Vector<\/em> 273<\/h4>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The thing that I like best about Chris Beckett\u2019s short stories in general, and this new collection, The Peacock Cloak, in particular is the rage that is bubbling under the surface and that occasionally erupts from the page. Not all the stories grip you by the throat, \u201cAtomic Truth\u201d, the first in this collection, is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[15],"tags":[116,69,47,43,46,71],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p27AP7-EE","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2520"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2520"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2520\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2524,"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2520\/revisions\/2524"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2520"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2520"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2520"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}