Sarah Hall’s third collection of short stories is the second of hers that I’ve read, but the first I’ve read in print. Three years ago, I borrowed the ebook edition of her Madame Zero (2017) from the library. In his review of that collection in The New Statesman, Tim Martin wrote:

So many of these stories are about characters who have vanished, become strange to themselves or stepped out of the centres of their own lives.

The displacements are literal, figurative and, occasionally, fantastical.

The stories in Sudden Traveller (2019) similarly tell of displacements that are literal, figurative and occasionally fantastic. My first impression was that the fantastic played a greater role in this collection than in the previous one but, counting up the ones without fantastic elements, I see I was mistaken about this. I’ve also found that the stories from Madame Zero that have stayed with me are, at least in my memory, naturalistic in style. The one that comes first to mind is “Wilderness” (the link is to its 2013 publication in The Guardian). The note I made at the time summarizes the story as one in which an Englishwoman and two South African men cross a rusting, decrepit and precarious viaduct high above a shallow estuary, as the strains in two separate relationships become all too evident. The other story from Madame Zero that I particularly remember is “Luxury Hour”, in which a new mother, escaping briefly from her baby for a quick swim in her local lido, unexpectedly runs into a former lover.

Whether fantastic or naturalistic (or some third thing) the stories in Sudden Traveller are all mysterious to some extent. The author gives us plenty of detail and particularity, so that we don’t feel that there are any gaps in the story, that anything material has been left out, and yet we will often have trouble interpreting these particulars correctly, in working out exactly what is going on.

Usually, if a writer is being oblique, if she’s withholding relevant information, the story is likely to seem unsatisfactory to the reader, as if it’s somehow incomplete, flimsier than it ought to be. These stories don’t seem at all incomplete or unsatisfactory, yet it’s impossible for the reader to be quite sure about certain important aspects. For example, in “The Grotesques”, what has become of Rebecca and her baby?

That story opens when the central character, Dilly, sees “the vagrant Charlie-bo” (p. 41) waking up under a shop awning on a Cambridge street. As a “prank”, some students have arranged a mask of fruit and vegetables over his face as he was sleeping. Dilly feels that she ought to help him but is too timid and fastidious to do so. She’s also late, though clearly not as late as she fears, as her delay is not mentioned by her mother or anybody else. It’s Dilly’s thirtieth birthday and her mother is hosting a rather boring party. Dilly is hungry enough to be in danger of fainting — her mother keeps a strict eye on both her daughters’ diet, afraid that their father’s “broad, Dutch genes” (p. 54) will make their presence obvious. The father himself is out of the picture, just beyond the edge of the frame: a friend of her mother’s tells Dilly that she bumped into him on the way to the party, and that he said to wish her a happy birthday.

Dilly appears immature for her age, as if she had not been allowed to grow up. She spent some time living (and presumably working) in London but has returned to live in her mother’s house. A Kenyan priest, speaking to her brother-in-law at the party, wants to give her a birthday blessing and is apparently taken aback to discover that she is all of 30 years old, though he had initially taken her for her married (and perhaps older) sister, Cleo.

Rebecca had been involved with Dilly’s brother, Peter, who is an officer in something, presumably military. Rebecca’s baby was apparently also Peter’s but it is is not made clear what happened to it. There was clearly a falling out between Rebecca and Peter’s mother, who thinks that Rebecca had an “over-attachment” to the baby.

Some of the words that had been said, by Rebecca when she was very upset, and also by Mummy, afterwards, had echoed in Dilly’s head a long time. Congenital. Abusive. Your son’s twisted priorities and your bloody eugenics — now it’s fine to destroy life? Dilly didn’t know how people could believe in exact opposites where humans were concerned. Mummy could be quite fierce about her sons, but sometimes Peter did need their help, actually, where emotions were concerned. (p. 58)

Rebecca’s reference to eugenics makes me wonder whether “Mummy” (who appears to be Catholic) put her under pressure, for unspecified reasons, to have an abortion, and Peter refused to take Rebecca’s side. In any case, the mother seems to be taking Rebecca’s revolt — “The greatest betrayal of all was to disaffiliate” (p. 59) — harder than her son does. So Rebecca is not at the party. Neither is Dilly’s boyfriend, Sam.

Dilly had wanted to ask Sam, but it was beginning to look like Sam didn’t meet with anyone’s approval. He’d been a bit too quiet at the dinner last week, and hadn’t wanted to sing when Mummy had asked him to. When Dilly had sung her number, a northern sea shanty, which she’d performed nicely but with the usual mild mortification, Sam had looked suddenly very frightened. He hadn’t replied to Dilly’s last three messages. (p. 46)

Following her return from London, Dilly’s mother had arranged a single session with a neighbouring psychoanalyst, Merrick.

He’d finished the session with a little talk about boundaries and identity within a family, he’d used a fishing-net metaphor, and Dilly had felt uncomfortable and was glad when it was over. (pp. 52–3)

At the party, having finally had two scones to eat, and divined that her mother didn’t want to criticize her or expect her to do anything like answer the door to guests, Dilly relaxes and decides that Merrick was wrong about families, boundaries and identity:

She had tried to be unmoored, tried to live without protections, but the world was full of grotesque, frightening, ridiculous things. It was full of meaningless sorrow and contradiction. Like a sick little baby, with a perfect soul. Here — didn’t he see? — they could all help each other. Failure could be forgiven, good things shared. They could all be each other. (pp. 64–5)

So, from Dilly’s point of view, the “grotesques” of the title are the frightening, ridiculous things that surround her, from which she feels she needs protection.

Towards the end of the story, Charlie-bo’s body is pulled out of the river. We don’t learn how he died; he had clearly been in a bad way when Dilly saw him earlier. Dilly had been thinking about him shortly before the discovery of his body was announced, and associated him with Rebecca, whom she describes as a scapegoat:

She thought of Charlie-bo … His ruined hazel eyes. His terrible predicament: not the fruit joke, but his life. She thought of Rebecca, pictured her, fatally, like the painting of the goat in the Fitzwilliam with its red headband, standing in salt near the water, its amber eyes dying. (p. 63)

She imagines the examination of Charlie-bo’s body. (He, too, has a red headband.) The face that is uncovered, “so peaceful and untormented” (p. 67) is her own. So Dilly identifies herself, in “a secret, dangerous thought, not ever to be shared with anyone” with both Rebecca and Charlie-bo, all of them people who “didn’t belong any more,” because they “took the sins of others and were cast out” (p. 63).

“The Woman the Book Read” has a male protagonist, a man who lives and is in business in a Turkish town by the sea. He appears to be English; at any rate, his business partner, Eymen, addresses him as “foreigner” (p. 26). (He addresses Eymen as “Arab”, p. 27.) As he’s waiting for Eymen, he hears a woman calling the unusual name Ara and thinks it must be the same Ara that he was reluctantly parted from 20 years earlier. He soon recognizes her as the same individual. He watches Ara and her companion as they get ready to go for a swim at Derya beach. The protagonist wonders if he should approach Ara, if she has perhaps come back to look for him, but he holds back. He has left Eymen at their café table without an explanation, and ignores other acquaintances whom he’d normally stop and speak to, risking their taking offence.

He recalls the delight he used to feel in her learning things:

He’d loved teaching her words, little phrases. Sentences were harder, she didn’t understand the order of syntax, but then neither had he at first, in reverse. (p. 29)

This probably explains the story’s title. At first glance, it looks as if it’s not a complete sentence, but consists simply of a noun qualified by a relative clause: the woman [whom] the book read. This would be a paradoxical phrase, as books can’t read. Once we know that the problem has to do with not understanding “the order of the syntax”, it becomes clear that this is a complete sentence, but it’s arranged subject-object-verb instead of subject-verb-object: the woman read the book.

The last time he had seen Ara, there had been tears and a fight. He reflects on how things might have been different.

If he’d had longer, maybe, or if he and Catherine had married, he could have made a decision that would have mattered in the end. Maybe he could have run with Ara. But everything had happened out of order, too fast, and the lines, no the law, had been made clear to him. (p. 35)

This starts alarm bells ringing. If he and Catherine (Ara’s mother) had married? In the same way as Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert married Charlotte Haze, not specifically to obtain control over Charlotte’s young daughter, but with that result? Is this a more sinister story than it has so far appeared, a tale of child sexual abuse? But no, apparently not. Catherine had been killed in an accident (so she resembled Charlotte Haze in one respect at least), and the protagonist is wondering whether, if they had been married, he might have a right to guardianship of his lover’s daughter. As it was, he had no rights at all and Ara had to go with her father …

… not understanding this wasn’t just a visit with a man she hardly knew, a stranger, who now had every right to keep her. As she’d mounted the train she had suddenly begun to cry and struggle, realising something was wrong, and she’d been lifted aboard quickly and disappeared. (p. 37)

But, once the suspicion of child sexual abuse has been planted, it’s very difficult to root it out completely. Isn’t there something a bit off in his fascination with the present physical reality of a woman he has hitherto known only as a child? He notices her beauty, and her resemblance to her mother. It’s true that he seems quite unperturbed by what he sees, as well as by the “[i]ntimate, sexual” (p. 34) quality of her gestures towards the woman who is with her. It’s probable that his feelings towards Ara have always been benign, harmless. But what if they haven’t?

On first reading, I thought several of the stories in this collection were vaguely disturbing, only to find on looking more closely that they were much more disturbing than I’d first thought. That’s true of “The Woman the Book Read”, and also of the first story in the book, “M”. Here, a busy lawyer is asked to represent a women’s refuge that is threatened with eviction because the freehold owner wants to redevelop the site as “unaffordable new flats” (p. 10). The attempts by the refuge to raise publicity gives its location away, so some of the husbands and abusers of the women who live there have besieged it. It’s the first pro bono case the lawyer has taken for a long time. She works the case, but the law is against them; there is little she can do legally. The women are dispersed.

In the meantime, the lawyer has been suffering excruciating pains at night. The pains culminate in the eruption from her shoulders of a huge pair of wings. She is transformed into a creature like “an angel with wings so vast they looked like moons” (p. 14). This creature visits the women who were previously in the refuge, carrying out abortions and bringing other forms of comfort and support. She also starts to kill abusive men. The first time, she does not prevent a rape, but picks the rapist up only afterwards. This isn’t calculated, it’s instinctive, and her instincts are developing. The second time, she snatches up the man just as he’s pushing his potential victim into an alley.

The passage in this story that I found particularly disturbing concerns a woman whom the angel caught up with too late for an abortion.

In a clinic in the south, a woman waits for the nurse to leave, then turns the baby over on its front, pushes its head down into the mattress of the crib. Warm, and soft as vegetable. It moves, surprises heer with its strength … The woman stops. She rolls the baby over and its mouth sucks air. Hasn’t got it in her … It should be both of them. Tomorrow she will take it to the river. She cries with relief. The baby cries for milk. The woman dozes. She feels a breeze and when she looks the little boy is gone, adopted by the wind. (pp. 19–20)

Obviously, the lawyer’s transformation into this creature is mysterious, but it’s not the only mystery in the story. Several times, before she became a lawyer, she very narrowly escaped death. The first time, she had scepticaemia from a burst appendix. The school nurse had told her twice to go back to class, and the surgeon said she was lucky to be alive. Next, she was inches away from the rolling tractor that crushed her father. The compensation from that incident paid for her legal eduction and a basement flat in London. When she was 19, she broke her spine or neck in a motorcycle accident; later, she had to be airlifted off a mountain with a broken ankle, unconscious and dehydrated after three days. As a child, she was raped and abused while her mother was in hospital. All of this formed part of “a life’s contract of survival and compensation” (p. 2).

I haven’t been able to work out what were the terms of this contract. Perhaps her violent, vengeful actions against predators and at least one innocent baby are the price that is being exacted from her for all the times she was saved from imminent death. But then why was her life so often at risk in the first place? I don’t have an answer to suggest.

At the end of the story, she goes back to the village of her childhood, to deal finally with the rapist-abuser. He’s still alive, though barely, so he can’t be her father. He seems to be the next-door neighbour, but again it’s not very clear. That doesn’t, in my view, make these stories any less satisfactory, though they remain disturbing.

Edition: Faber paperback, 2020; emphasis original, ellipses added.