Night Geometry and the Garscadden Trains

by A.L. Kennedy

The heroes and heroines of Night Geometry and the Garscadden Trains, A. L. Kennedy's first collection of stories, are small people - the kind who inhabit the silence in libraries, who never appear on screen and who never make the headlines. Often alone and sometimes lonely, her characters ponder the mysteries of sex and death-and the ability of public transport to affect our lives.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Scotland, British Literature

138 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1991

About the author

Alison Louise Kennedy is a Scottish writer of novels, short stories and non-fiction. She is known for a characteristically dark tone, a blending of realism and fantasy, and for her serious approach to her work. She occasionally contributes columns and reviews to UK and European newspapers including the fictional diary of her pet parrot named Charlie.

Reviews

[Colin Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

A.L. Kennedy’s Night Geometry and the Garscadden Trains is a pure heart book for me.

I write for a living (not every hour of my gig, but enough that it’s the primary reason I have the job) and, like any art, when you make your own, you’re more likely to see the internal mechanics rather than simply having a surface level enjoyment of the medium. My brother, a career musician, can’t listen to songs without hearing theory and chord progressions. As for me, it’s rare that I read a book without seeing plot structure, character development and literary theories, but A.L. Kennedy’s first short story collection was able to bypass all that, taking the stories from my head and placing them into my heart.

These stories do not reflect my life. Many are about lonely people, infidelity and broken families (whereas I come from a loving family, am happily married and have strong friendships). There’s nothing particularly exciting about the plot lines or charming in the characters, and while I’ve fallen off later A.L. Kennedy works (not enough heart and too much hedonism for my taste), I still love many of the stories from Night Geometry and the Garscadden Trains. I even look at the lines from this collection that spoke to me and think about how they could be written better, only to come back and realize their beauty as is. Take this line from the title story: “Nothing makes you feel more stupid than finding out you were wrong when you thought you were loved.” There’s nothing complicated about that line—no alliteration or stellar metaphor. Even the structure is wrong, slightly off-kilter, yet that’s what makes it work. In the everyday world, that last word should be ‘right,’ but if it is ‘loved’ (which it is), that section should come before the ‘wrong’ section in the sentence structure, yet it’s all those things done wrong that makes the sentence work. Or at least for me it does. Anyway, enough of this head nonsense. I don’t feel like I’m getting my appreciation across in this garbled review.

“Star Dust” is my favorite short story. Not just from this collection; we’re talking favorite, period, but I can’t tell you why. It’s just an old lady talking about how people assume she’s senile. She takes pictures and thinks about the movies she would make for the normal people she has known in her life. Yup, that’s it, and I absolutely treasure it. It’s not all that quotable either (though there is an interesting section about missing the best parts of your mother because she was busy raising you and you were too young to know better), but that story speaks to parts of me I can’t even explain, which is maybe why I love it so much. Here’s the thing: You could go out right now and pick up this collection, read through my recommended pieces—including “Sweet Memory Will Die,” “The Role of Notable Silences in Scottish History” and the title story—and I wouldn’t be surprised if you found them too everyday and too boring, because I know it’s not for everyone, and if I’m honest, that makes me love the collection all the more. Five stars.

[Karen· · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Go into any place where history is stored and listen. Hold your breath. Hear how still it is. Librarians and archivists will keep their visitors quiet, but this particular silence has nothing to do with them. It runs through buzzing computer rooms and waits in busy record offices, it is always there. It is the sound of nothingness. It is the huge, invisible, silent roar of all the people who are too small to record. They disappear and leave the past inhabited only by murderers and prodigies and saints." (p. 64)

Kennedy writes of those people whose lives are too small and insignificant to warrant a grand narrative. The short stories in this, her first collection, note those moments of betrayal and failure, of liberation and clarity and the effect that public transport can have on the weft and weave of our relations with others. Writing and reading belong to the range of themes too.

I'm afraid I'm hardly able to recall specific stories: this was my bedside book for so long that I might just as well leave it there and go back to the beginning again: rather like painting the Forth Rail Bridge, once you've reached the end it's time to go back and start again. However, one very special one has remained in mind; "The role of notable silences in Scottish history" from which the quote is taken. It's a wonderful example of Kennedy's dark humour. "..everyone knows I lie too much, so who would believe me. I wouldn't believe myself." The question is, which lies do we believe?

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm conflicted about giving this book four stars. Perhaps it rates five, perhaps it rates 3. My now ex, Fiona, left it here the last time she came over from Scotland, and I have no idea if she left it as a parting gift, as something she was done with and couldn't be bothered to take back, or as a poisoned box of chocolates.

There might be a few stories with some positive uplift, and certainly there are moments, in almost every story, that make you look at your world, your day, the view out your window, or the light on the water of a river as you walk beside it, that change, or might change how you see the world.

But many of the stories are bleak in their spare plots: a wife walks in on her husband shagging his girlfriend in the marital bed, a woman murders her husband and then, in a mental hospital (well, that seems to be where we are), spends a few brief uplifting moments with a man who has murdered his wife, a fact which the narrator only learns when she asks the man, who is quite kind to her, if he has ever been married, or if he desires to be married. Not really, because the first one he married he ended up murdering. In another story a man tells his wife that he has been unfaithful, when in fact, he hasn't been, and then spends the rest of the story trying to figure out why he would have done so, and perhaps regretting it.

Sounds extremely bleak, no? Several times in the stories Kennedy mentions that she wants to document the "small people," the people who, when they are dead and gone, leave nothing behind them. That too is not particularly comforting.

So why am I at all conflicted about recommending this book (Kennedy's first book of short stories)? Because her writing is unique, and accomplished, and worth contemplation. She combines a highly eliiptical style with an almost off-hand poetry. Any given sentence will seem to have three things it wants to tell you, but will only tell you two of them, and will tell you in a way no other writer might do. And the stories are mostly like 50o piece jigsaw puzzles in which you are only given 355 pieces.

If you are interested in the way in which writers put together stories, and are interested in alternative possibilities for telling stories with perhaps more conventional plots, Kennedy is an excellent choice. If you are a male who wants to think well of your gender, this is probably not a short story collection in which you will find much consolation.

[Liedzeit Liedzeit · Rating 2 out of 5]

I liked the cover of the book. And the title story is quite good, actually. But I did not like it. I guess, the writing style is supposed to be modern, but I am unmoved. To give an example, Poor Souls starts like this: "Last night, I had a thought. Snow is like bad news." - Really? I could think of many things to associate with snow, but bad news?
In the aptly named story "The Last" the heroine likes reading Science Fiction, like Asimov and Dick and McKenna (unknown to me) and she observes that "they write about worlds as if there were only a town of two, maybe a wee continent." Very nice, but this is not enough to earn a third star. (She is fond of the word "wee", by the way, but I will not hold this against her.)

[Ben Haines]

wasn't what I expected from the cover. good stories, the writing sometimes felt strange or disconnected though, like I wasn't paying enough attention, kind of jumpy.

lots of small sad lonely people, worrying about being forgotten by history.

The role of notable silences in Scottish history - a woman writes obituaries for people she hasn't met
Star dust - Old woman takes photographs and thinks about making films
The seaside photographer

[ая · Rating 4 out of 5]

"All I can do is write you words you cannot read and feel them between us."
- A. L. Kennedy, The Seaside Photographer

[Martin Raybould · Rating 4 out of 5]

The title short story is the jewel here but all the others are surprising, engaging and occasionally shocking tales.

[Gloomy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some great insight by lonely divorced women

[Marie · Rating 4 out of 5]

My first impression was: What the heck did I just read? On the second read, though... Kennedy never ceases to surprise me.

[Mark Steven · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rough around the edges at times, by AL Kennedy standards, but there are some powerful stories here.

[Lis · Rating 3 out of 5]

I loved some of this very much.

[Ape · Rating 3 out of 5]

2007 bookcrossing journal:

This is a collection of short stories, maybe some of the first she had published. They are fantastic writing, but as always with Kennedy's work, they range from melancholic, to depressing and downright twisted. She never seems to experience the joy of living - but then each writer has their own way of looking at the world and expressing it.

I liked some of these better than others, although they are all good. A lot of couples drifting apart (if they were ever really together), lonely people and child abuse. There's this continuing theme, of the little, ordinary people, and how we are all soon forgotten when we die, considered unimportant, but that we all have a story to tell. I liked the one about the woman and her family of goblins and finally fleeing them; the woman haunted in bed by the ghosts of her old lovers; the crazy woman with her imaginary husband who travels about on trains. And the title story.

[Peter Dunn · Rating 4 out of 5]

A.L.Kennedy has written a lot of bleak stuff and this is from her earliest and bleakest period so you really should expect that you will need to steel yourself to a relentless pounding of sadness, broken and sundered relationships and people (mostly men) causing misery. However it’s well written haunting misery and if you need to read something lighter and life affirming to recover then you can always read her latest Doctor Who: The Drosten's Curse.

Failing that, if you need a distraction from the misery, do look out for certain elements that appear to have been deliberately placed/paired by the author in two different stories just to see if we are paying attention. In particular white stiletto shoes and blue veins. Potatoes crop up an awful lot as well but as an Ulsterman I can fully understand that is just function of the Scots and Ulster diet…

[Steven · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kennedy’s first collection of stories. Nothing particularly catching here, at least on the first read. Most of the stories are monologues dealing with memory. Child abuse, infidelities, and people leaving relationships are the key themes. She does a weird thing with dialogue; almost never uses attributions, often lets dialogue stand alone in separate sections without description, just lets the words sit there. Sometimes it works, but a lot of the time it’s confusing because it is not always clear who’s speaking. On purpose? Or deficient craft? Hard to say, although she does do it better in her second collection.

[Mircalla · Rating 4 out of 5]

geometrie di dolore per lo più ermetico

racconti cupi, questo è il libro di esordio di Kennedy e il suo più duro, sono storie tristi certo, di un lugubre che solo uno scozzese potrebbe partorire, ma soprattutto sono storie di sconfitta e di rassegnazione, di cose che sono andate male e non possono che peggiorare o che, essendo andate così, spiegano perchè il tutto deve essere così pesante e doloroso a trascinarsi...ma poi nelle raccolte successive un pochino di luce si vede, no, forse era un riflesso

[Grace · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another great book of short stories