Rhys Davies Short Story Competition Winners

The Judges’ Adjudication

Welsh writers and readers have enjoyed a long love affair with the short story form: in the hands of Rhys Davies, Glyn Jones, Dylan Thomas and Alun Lewis, it showed its capacity for lyric intensity, panache and brio, subtle intricacy and memorable enigma.  Inconclusive, oblique and eccentric, short narrative is an open form that can take any shape and yet be beautiful. Like Blake’s ‘universe in a grain of sand’, it is microcosmic; a crystal whose several faces reflect multiple realities through laconic telling, disjunction, irony. A good short story may treat just a few moments in a life, take half an hour to read and haunt us ever after by a world of shimmering implication. Traditionally a low status form, short narrative is finely placed to reflect an audacious and aberrant view from the margins: the view from a pram, a cave, a Bosnian mountain, a chador. The short story has a phenomenal power to challenge and trouble its reader.

This year over 600 stories were entered into the Rhys Davies Competition. Jon Gower, who read all the entries, selected 80 to pass on to us. We encountered a considerable range of techniques, from the traditional twist-in-the-tail story to teasing experiments with organisation, style and theme. Voice is everything in writing short fiction, breathing life and credibility into narrative. We noticed the hybridity of voices in many of the tales, braiding dialects and languages – English, with Welsh, Pakistani, Creole, Rasta, Russian. There were fairy tales, fables, satires, comedy (both light and dark), monologues, yarns, ghost stories, postmodern experiments. We were especially impressed by writing that showed inventive freshness of approach both to form and language, involving us deeply in the story’s world. We readily agreed on the winner.

The winning tale, Getting Up, was – for both of us – not just memorable but unforgettable, beautifully composed, instinct with tacit meaning. Like many excellent stories, it takes place in an enclosed space and spans a few critical moments. A schoolboy sent on an Outward Bound course as punishment for daubing graffiti tumbles into a cave, finding himself alongside the carcass of a Jack Russell, ‘seeing it better for touching it; the delicate harp of the ribs, the stalagtite teeth’. The cave, the world of death, is also a vessel of memory, offering strange alliance and an intimation of other realms of art and civilisation. The elliptical originality of the tale, its narrative brilliance and its constantly suspended surprises enthralled both the judges.

If Those Who Have Plenty Take is a vision of hell, the view from a flat in a block of nine serially inhabited by arsonists, guys with guns, rapists, raped girls, victims and abusers and abusers who are victims: it’s told in a mingling of second and third person by a narrator encompassed by human suffering. Intelligently sympathetic but afraid for her own life, she’s cornered: the reader, invoked as ‘you’ into her experience, feels trapped with the narrator in the heart-breaking tale.

Zeina, set in Dubai, is composed by a writer who is clearly an exquisite stylist, with copious and choice vocabulary and a succinct restraint of manner: where East meets West, the male narrator eyes forbidden Arab women, ‘a waft of olfactory opulence trailing them as they ghosted by, kohl-eyed and straight-backed’. The story shows the beautiful girl reporter, Zeina, negotiating the lethal border between cultures as she breaks haraam to gives a lift to a western man.

Things in their Season, written in a sharp, incisive and ironic style, is irreverent, caustic and laugh-aloud funny. It incorporates a playlet and is perhaps the story which most evokes the darkly hilarious epigrammatic flair of Rhys Davies himself. It begins: ‘During the Second World War I bayoneted a pregnant woman. Her name was Marjory’ and proceeds to unpack this statement of a seven-year old’s transgression and its wild consequences.

Pyrotechnics characterise one kind of short story; Chekhovian subtlety and seriousness another. Life-Task is one of those quiet, nuanced narratives that refract light into the depths of human tragedy. The story – oblique, harrowing, beautiful - bears witness (‘I can only say as I remember …’) to the personal cost of war. Its action occupies just a few recessive moments, on a station platform where the narrator awaits a train bearing returnee soldiers to their families – and is forever changed by the mute scene she witnesses.

Dammed is a monologue which evokes, in a suggestive and imagistic style, the bitterly valedictory mood of the aftermath of a death. Helplessly inert in the face of family pressure, the narrator records the ‘breaking of a dam’ in an explosion of sensual self-assertion. The narrative use of imagery is striking and memorable.

The Mary's voice rings completely true; not one false step is made. Fuelled and driven by anger at hypocrisy and self-delusion and smugness, the story is stamped with personal experience. Yet this closeness, and the potentially riotous emotions behind the narrative, are never allowed to mar either craft or accomplishment. The writer's triumph is to be savoured as much as that of his/her protagonist's.
 
Like If Those Who Have Plenty Take, the world of Onions is an enclosed one; specifically, a valleys curry-house at a weekend, in which we witness the clash of several disparate cultures, all of which the writer powerfully evokes with the briefest of sketches. The epiphanic moment at the story's close is expertly done: the headlights of a passing car beam into the restaurant, and 'the people were lit up, momentarily, clear as diamonds [and] Mohamed could see for the first time in his life'. A remarkably controlled piece of work.

Lived experience also appears to animate July 1995, which centres around a memory of massacre during the Balkan wars of the 1990s, in which the narrator lost her husband. It convinces completely. The necessary brutality of the natural world, embodied in the beautifully-drawn lynx, is set against the tawdrier nastiness of humanity, thereby compounding the heartbreak. It's a terrifically haunting story. A compressed novel, which is what, of course, the best short stories should aspire to be.

Sand is a fascinating puzzle, accomplished and intriguing, which achieves the highly unusual task of being almost all back-story but suggestive of other layers, secret strata in the story’s archaeology, reflected in the concentric narrative structure. Who is the 'I'? Why is s/he so afraid of the 'he'? What was in the box? Why are 'his' nails 'lacquered', and why is that detail so redolently sinister? If we can agree that the best short stories are all middle, largely without beginning or end, then Sand is exemplary. The elliptical narrative creates a rare dilemma: the reader hungers to know more, but at the same time is made aware that satiety leads to dissatisfaction.

Contrastingly, but no less successfully, Members of the Jury, What is Your Verdict? is a welter of voice and viewpoint as several narrators describe their particular versions of a violent incident, again in the valleys, and transcribed in the demotic of that region. The story’s ambition is exhilarating, as is its accomplishment, for here technical experiment transcends novelty or tricksiness. In each voice we glimpse character, background, personality, the thousand branches of experience and contact that spread from the trunk of each witness. Such creative perspectivism reminds us that the tight form of the short story genre needn't constrain: daring experiment can create something refreshingly unique.

By Stevie Davies and Niall Griffiths