re:mote voices

Title: Too Beautiful for You
Author: Rod Liddle
Publisher:Century

This is a collection of short stories by the writer Ron Liddle, who seems to have had various roles within the media before the publication of this volume. The stories have a particularly London-centric view, which is at times off-putting, especially with the gimmick of referring to locations by their post codes as though it is meaningful (which no doubt given the population of London to the rest of the country it may well be, but for the likes of myself it is nothing).

There is something about Too Beautiful For You, which reminds of Jeremy Sheldon’s Comfort Zone, perhaps both come from a certain generation of English writers, capturing a certain voice, a certain general environmental scene? Regardless of the two, I found that Sheldon’s Comfort Zone was the more accomplished, rounded and enjoyable of the two. From which, I would say that there is something lacking with Liddle’s work. There are spatterings of ideas which could be interesting, quirks to characters that are just pasted in enough to suggest something, without actually particularly coming to anything. There are points where he tries to include something weird, something out there, but those kind of fall flat, again giving the impression of being secondary.

Most of the stories rotate around couples, relationships, with a group of friends starting to emerge as the collection goes on. So that primary characters recur in secondary roles at various points, which is something that can work out. In one story a young student is desperately in love with a girl, but she has gone wild, drugs and parties and random sex. The two of them have a thing together, where she insists by not having sex with him she shows how much she really loves him. She recurs later, on the arm of some bloke she is sleeping with, in a story where the main character has ended up having a relationship with an illegal alien, who was a tramp when they first met. In the background of which a woman who appeared as the mistress of a man elsewhere is turning into an insect. There are times where Liddle succeeds, where he manages to get his story together, and bring with it a certain humour, in particular the one with the man who is involved in a train crash. Unfortunately he has told his wife he was going to a convention, so why he was on a train on the other side of the city altogether will look suspicious. So he damn well better come up with a good excuse for how he lost that arm.