Friends of Friends is a series of connected, overlapping, parallel and divergent tales. These are narrative fragments - though without the bittiness that might imply. They range from single sentence flash-fictions to three or four page short stories. Each has its own coherence and narrative logic. Occasionally, two or three are related to each other in sequence. Usually, the linkages are more fugitive. A number of named characters re-appear – 'Sandra' and 'Nush' are in two tales, 'Nicky' in three, 'Mabel' in four, and so on. Recurring themes range from trivial to sublime: rain, buses (or forms of public transport), libraries, apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic landscapes. Scenarios repeat themselves, too; perhaps the most persistent is that of people who were separated in early adulthood, meeting up in middle-age, and trying to deal with the odd mixture of knowing and not-knowing, intimacy and distance, which colours and shapes such encounters ('The clutch bag' is one example). Ours is the age of Friends Reunited, Facebook, social media. This is now a common experience; we have become used to it, but it is relatively new and unprecedented, and no writer, as far as I know, has responded to it as variously or as imaginatively as Sawers.
Friends of Friends is not set in the present; it is not 'set,' in any fixed sense, anywhere. In historical terms it jumps about, particularly at the outset, with tales in eighteenth- or nineteenth-century settings ('The Ticket' is explicitly set 'in 1859'), recounted in vaguely appropriate pastiche styles, as in 'Constance,' 'Green Eyes,' or 'Home from China'; socially, we could be dealing with countesses or beggars; territorially we might be in MittelEuropa, Spain, the USA, although it is predominantly England. The pastiche is a little contrived, deliberately it seems to me, because Sawers is concerned at all times to prevent us skimming, slipping into the complacency induced by naturalistic styles. In generic terms Friends of Friends is more wide-ranging; the first tale, 'The tree half in flames,' takes its title from the episode of a half-burning, half-verdant bush in The Mabinogion, there are Märchen elements in 'City Air,' and Irish legend in 'Yoss and Finn,' a brief, wittily-told encounter with the Salmon of Wisdom, while 'The Translators' reads like a parable by Zbigniew Herbert.
Like the styles, the generic mix is often unstable; the nineteenth-century mode of 'City Air,' for example, has a counterfactual history in the form of an invasion of Britain by Russia and France, and 'The Ticket,' in a quasi-SciFi aside, tells of colliding galaxies.
As all this may suggest, the liberties taken with fiction verge on poetry. Prose poetry in English, as many critics have observed, can tend towards pawky charm and rather voulu symbolism. Sawers's semi-disjunctive framework and disconnective practices mitigate against these dangers. The tales are often dreamlike, and hardly ever explicit - dénouments are partial or ambiguous, but always precise. The temptation is to use adjectives like 'Borghesian' or 'magic realist' at this point. But for one thing, so many stories are rooted in specific British realities: a student union building, a number 17 bus, Oxford Road. For another, the pieces often break into 'real' poetry; there are moments of genuine metaphorical power and originality, as in the close of 'In Blue': 'An electric river runs through her and it circles us now like a halo around the moon on a frosty night, and an odd delight begins to burn in my fingertips. I am caves of ice, I am the sun cracking ice in mid-afternoon, I am the jostling, lacerating glassy plates pressing up against the lock gates. Rivers never reach the sea. You haven’t heard me before.'
Even the titles of the tales can be poems in themselves: 'After you die, you will never have loved me.' Sawers is a poet, too, in his ability to quickly conjure up mood and atmosphere, but lest this seem an over-Romantic definition, he is alert to the weight of words in a contemporary, experimental way. It's no coincidence that the opening sentence has mayflies 'sawing in the air,’ in a play on his own name, or that we find Sandra waking up to find herself 'a pear. Maybe a bear. She felt comfy in her new pelt ... she didn't miss having a waistline.' The humour of the waistline line is evident throughout; Sawers is a gifted comic writer when he wants to be. It is a sign that Sawers is a genuine writer, not a re-treader of old ground. This doesn't apply simply to mainstream fiction, but to modernism; a woman who wakes up and finds herself a pear is clearly a descendant of Gregor Samsa, but her metamorphosis does not lead to the angst and anguish in Kafka.
Angst and anguish there is, however, as in any genuine art, but it's of what we used to call the postmodern variety. This is a term that was overused for a long time. But it's wholly applicable to Friends of Friends, which ticks all the boxes; along with stylistic pastiche, generic hybridity, ontological uncertainty and linguistic self-consciousness, we get explicit finger-pointing, as when a 'panning camera comes to rest' on a discussion at a nineteenth-century dinner-table. The criticism of such writing was often that it was heartlessly playful. But that isn't the case here. Despite its fragmentariness, Friends of Friends has real heft: the whole is more than the sum of its brilliant parts. Large issues are raised, subtly yet powerfully, occasionally outcropping as questions - 'How can we resist the marketisation of ourselves?' – but usually by implication. At its heart is that old universal, namely a keen awareness of the brevity of life, and hence the urgency to connect, create, be aware of others and other life-forms. Mayflies, traditional emblems of the brevity of life, 'swarm in the morning' in the opening story and return to 'swarm in the evening' in the penultimate story. The very final tale, a coda (we have passed through the wood to a mythic sea-shore), is another reverberating miniature which punches many times above its weight, an enigma I won't ruin, except to say it finds the words that 'don't mean anything' but are nevertheless, 'a path, a boardwalk,' for its readers.
John Goodby is a poet and critic, and Professor of Art and Culture at Sheffield Hallam University. His new biography of Dylan Thomas, co-authored with Chris Wigginton, has just been published by Reaktion Books.
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