The world shrinks, to “lambent pupils on the water”, the “enterprising tentacles” of octopuses, their “liquid squeeze”. The collection ends with the extraordinary Salt Slow, in which a man and a pregnant woman find themselves in a small boat on an ocean that has drowned everything they know – a conceit that reaches both forward, to the predicted effects of climate change, and back, through Noah’s flood to creation.
Armfield is extremely good at anatomising the women’s relationship – the small moments of which lasting love consists The effect is only heightened by a deliberate, vivid realism of place (Newport, Manchester, Glasgow rented flats, bars in university towns) and a discerning interest in the shifting power structures of relationships. It is tricky to describe what happens without giving away the endings – which, when you become used to her method, are often prefigured in the beginnings, and in the classical tales her literalism both defamiliarises and renews: wolf-siblings, maenads, a gorgon. So a convent schoolgirl with problem skin, always shedding and peeling, undergoes a metamorphosis or a town fills with Sleeps, each having stepped out of its owner “like a passenger from a railway carriage”. Choose a quotidian phenomenon – problem skin, say, or sleeplessness – and use it as a foundation stone for relentlessly logical, haunted edifices reminiscent of the contemporary gothic of Mariana Enríquez or Guadalupe Nettel.
J ulia Armfield’s first book, a collection of stories called Salt Slow, set out a method.
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