Review by Nakisha Towers of "Astral Travel" by Elizabeth Baines

Astral Travel by Elizabeth Baines is a metafictional novel that follows Jo, a writer, who, years after his death, is hit by an unexpected urge to write about her father and the effects of his abuse during her childhood - remnants of which still continue in the lives of his adult daughters.

Framing the narrative is a familiar process of writing and storytelling. Through this process, Jo attempts to understand her father and the many mysteries surrounding his tumultuous and often troubled life. As a result, the book is a weaving together of a life through memories, vague stories and imagination – a tool Jo uses to fill in the gaps of missing or reluctantly provided information. 

Placing her father, posthumously, into the moments of her childhood that she remembers – or thinks she does - Jo tries to re-imagine or even recreate her father’s reaction; forcing him - in death - to confront the torment she experiences as a child. Instead, she is often faced with a deepening sense of the mystery she is attempting to resolve. She's unhelped by her submissive mother, who, in denial, has a stoic unwillingness to face reality.

Baines’s ability to evoke internal outrage and frustration through prose, that is sometimes brutal but always beautiful, is a skill that works so naturally on the page. With her narrator, we re-live painful and disturbing memories of childhood. We feel rage at the injustice she suffered at the hands of both parents. Readers who have had a difficult relationship with a parent may well find themselves re-living their own experiences too. Such is the power of her prose.

The story, that reads more like a fictional autobiography than a novel, is comfortable leaving loose ends; a reminder that, although Jo’s mother does eventually reveal a deep family secret which goes a little way to providing an explanation for her father’s all-consuming rage, real life cannot be tied up in a comfortable, bow-like conclusion.

About the reviewer
Nakisha Towers studied a Creative Writing Masters at the University of Leicester. In between navigating parenting and home-schooling, she likes to write poetry. She is currently re-working a collection of poetry she wrote for her MA dissertation about maternal mental health.

Review by Tim Love of "Used to Be" by Elizabeth Baines

(This review was originally published here.)


The Mandaeans of southern Iraq had a demon called Dinanukht, half man and half book, who "sits by the waters between the worlds, reading himself". This demon could be the patron saint of Bainesland, where characters interpret symbols that seem to belong to the external world, but turn out being part of the character's past.

These 12 stories span a range of symbolic visibility. In the epistolic “A matter of light” set in May 1816, a self-proclaimed rational man dismisses strange events as interesting physical phenomena, tricks of the light worthy of investigation. Even when he entertains the possibility of ghosts, he dismisses the notion because he's lived too virtuous a life to deserve being haunted. But we learn he's a plantation owner and that his treatment of slaves wasn't perfect. The dark shadows and the “light” of the title take on racial overtones.

In “Looking for the Castle” the symbolism's more overt. A women takes a detour to visit her home town. She has problems navigating her past. Has so much really changed? Maybe the unfindable castle's really the misremembered priory. But what is she really seeking? Was her childhood a place where she felt safe, or was it a confinement that still restricts her? After all, the fence her father built is still there.

“Used To Be” includes another mindscape – two middle-aged sisters, actresses, are on their way to an amateur film-set. The journey of bridges and missed turnings becomes a metaphor ("And flashing past with the bridges are all my selves") then becomes another story to tell when they arrive late.

Further along the overtness spectrum is "Tides or How Stories Do or Don't Get Told". Fans of "show, not tell“ might balk at the 13 mentions of ”story“ or ”stories" and the discussion of narratives – e.g. "Would I mention my sense then that nothing had meaning and that my life after all was no story, or would I lie, since he recovered, and make those symbols fit a narrative arc with a happy ending?" - but to me it's like the stage magician who explains how a trick works only to surprise the audience later. What kind of story of herself does the narrator want to write?

The protagonists come in many varieties (male/female, young/old, presented in the first, second and third person), but they're all opening a debate with their past. Sometimes it's disowned - "I see her, my former self, as another person" - used as raw material to be melted down, reforged. Sometimes it illuminates the present. The settings encourage reinterpretations – film-sets, Brontë country, old haunts. Explicitly or otherwise, the characters are story-makers, reassembling their life-arc from stirred memories.

Whatever the uncertainty of the narrators, the characters are utterly believable. There's always the sensation of an underlying reality. Characters may exhibit enhanced free will once they've unshackled themselves from the past, but the real world is a given.

My favourites are “Used to be”, “Falling” and especially "Tides or How Stories Do or Don't Get Told" (which is much shorter than I recall it being). None of the stories are routine, which is no surprise given that they've all been published already in places like Carve Magazine, Unthology, Stand and Best British Short Stories. You can buy it directly from Salt.

About the reviewer
Tim Love’s publications are a poetry pamphlet Moving Parts (HappenStance, 2010) and a story collection By all means (Nine Arches Press, 2012). He lives in Cambridge, UK, teaching computing. His poetry and prose have appeared in Stand, Rialto, Oxford Poetry, Journal of Microliterature, Short Fiction, New Walk, etc. He blogs at http://litrefs.blogspot.com/.

Review by Hannah Stevens of "Used To Be" by Elizabeth Baines

Used To Be (published by Salt, 2015) is a collection packed with bursts of intense short stories, written in clean, sharp prose. The stories are immersive and gripping. I read this book in one sitting.

There is a breathlessness and urgency to the rhythms of this collection and stories are dark and full of damaged people. Most of the characters you will encounter on these pages don’t have names but in spite of this feel knowable: there are parts of me in these characters that I recognise.

The collection is punctuated with disturbing and dark description: in "Used To Be" – the title story – there is a "stomach flat as a teenage anorexic’s." In "That Turbulent Stillness" – "a hole was punched in the… day, and also her heart." In "Where The Starlings Fly" – "the sound of bickering haemorrhaged in." There is violence and wreckage in these stories but ultimately there is an undercurrent of redemption and hope: nothing in this collection is definite and, as in life, there are different and alternative endings and we can choose them.

About the reviewer
Hannah is from Leicester and is a PhD student in Creative Writing at Leicester University. She has a short story collection called Without Makeup and Other Stories (2012) and has had stories published in Crystal Voices: Ten Years of Crystal Clear Creators (2015) and The New Luciad (2015).