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Human Terrain
Human Terrain. The Army acknowledges, through the lessons of Afghanistan and Iraq, that human geography is as important as any satellite map.
Human Terrain deals with female voices and working-class existences, ordinary lives transformed by loss and love. There’s the mother working as cutman for her daughter in the boxing ring; the family who find themselves abandoned at the seaside; the gardener digging for love among the grass cuttings and weeds. Characters standing in a classroom, drinking in a pub, working the fryer in a fish and chip shop, or finding love in an ice warehouse, they all inhabit the collection. Stories full of dark humour and deep tenderness that depict the characters’ struggles to understand their place in the world.
Praise for Emily Bullock
Startlingly original and poetic – Bullock combines horror and brutality with unexpected moments of tenderness. (on Inside the Beautiful Inside)
— The Observer
Emily Bullock’s debut, The Longest Fight, [is] a fine addition to the canon of boxing literature… And Bullock too, is alert to boxing’s nobility, as well as its barbarity, in this grittily impressive first novel. (on The Longest Fight)
— Independent on Sunday
Human Terrain deals with female voices and working-class existences, ordinary lives transformed by loss and love. There’s the mother working as cutman for her daughter in the boxing ring; the family who find themselves abandoned at the seaside; the gardener digging for love among the grass cuttings and weeds. Characters standing in a classroom, drinking in a pub, working the fryer in a fish and chip shop, or finding love in an ice warehouse, they all inhabit the collection. Stories full of dark humour and deep tenderness that depict the characters’ struggles to understand their place in the world.
Praise for Emily Bullock
Startlingly original and poetic – Bullock combines horror and brutality with unexpected moments of tenderness. (on Inside the Beautiful Inside)
— The Observer
Emily Bullock’s debut, The Longest Fight, [is] a fine addition to the canon of boxing literature… And Bullock too, is alert to boxing’s nobility, as well as its barbarity, in this grittily impressive first novel. (on The Longest Fight)
— Independent on Sunday
176 pages, Paperback
Published August 31, 2021
11 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
October 4, 2021
It’s ten years now since I read ‘My Girl’, the story that won Emily Bullock the Bristol Short Story Prize. So many things have changed in that time, but I could still recall the atmosphere of that story. ‘My Girl’ is here again at the start of Human Terrain, Bullock’s new collection from Reflex Press. It was a pleasure to re-read: narrated by a mother acting as cutman for her daughter in a boxing match, it switches between a vivid account of the present fight and reflecting on the events that brought the pair to where they are. ‘My Girl’ is a story that works equally as well taken at face value and as a metaphor for the characters’ relationship.
Like ‘My Girl’, the title story of Human Terrain places its protagonist in a situation that may or may not be read as real, in order to illuminate a mother-daughter relationship. A woman stands at the front of a lecture theatre, but this isn’t going to be the standard War Studies lecture that the students are expecting. The narrator wants to tell the audience about her daughter in Iraq, a much more personal story than the dispassionate accounts they're used to. History isn't in the textbooks, she says, but neither is it quite in her daughter's story – the truth for her is something more raw and brutal.
Bullock's characters are often facing situations that embody the tensions in their lives, but sometimes her stories document a more abrupt change. 'Zoom' is set in rural Lincolnshire, where a boy has a school assignment called "Getting to Know Your Neighbours". But his neighbours aren't so easy to approach, so he's taken to filming them instead of trying to interview them. There's an irony in that the boy doesn't get to know his neighbours that well at all through the filming , as the story's sudden, powerful ending illustrates.
Perhaps my favourite story in Bullock’s collection is ‘Open House’. In this, Freddie sees that his childhood home is up for sale, and decides to pay a visit during the open house, the first time he’s been back to Whitechapel in twenty years. What he finds is an uneasy mixture of the past coming back to him while the present unspools out of his grasp. "A person's life shouldn't be an open house," Freddie thinks, "for strangers to trample through and pick over". It's a pointed sentiment in a collection of vivid portraits.
Like ‘My Girl’, the title story of Human Terrain places its protagonist in a situation that may or may not be read as real, in order to illuminate a mother-daughter relationship. A woman stands at the front of a lecture theatre, but this isn’t going to be the standard War Studies lecture that the students are expecting. The narrator wants to tell the audience about her daughter in Iraq, a much more personal story than the dispassionate accounts they're used to. History isn't in the textbooks, she says, but neither is it quite in her daughter's story – the truth for her is something more raw and brutal.
Bullock's characters are often facing situations that embody the tensions in their lives, but sometimes her stories document a more abrupt change. 'Zoom' is set in rural Lincolnshire, where a boy has a school assignment called "Getting to Know Your Neighbours". But his neighbours aren't so easy to approach, so he's taken to filming them instead of trying to interview them. There's an irony in that the boy doesn't get to know his neighbours that well at all through the filming , as the story's sudden, powerful ending illustrates.
Perhaps my favourite story in Bullock’s collection is ‘Open House’. In this, Freddie sees that his childhood home is up for sale, and decides to pay a visit during the open house, the first time he’s been back to Whitechapel in twenty years. What he finds is an uneasy mixture of the past coming back to him while the present unspools out of his grasp. "A person's life shouldn't be an open house," Freddie thinks, "for strangers to trample through and pick over". It's a pointed sentiment in a collection of vivid portraits.
January 23, 2022
I knew from reading Bullock’s exceptional novel Inside The Beautiful Inside that her prose is something special: powerful, muscular, packing a punch (a pun that reminds me I still have her debut novel, set in the world of boxing, on my TBR). While none of that is lost in her shorter fiction, the roaming focus diffuses the intensity and allows for a more widespread examination of what it means to be human in this complex world. There is a hard edge to these stories, an unflinching gaze at the reality of coming to terms with our modern age. At times, there is an almost journalistic sensibility, a feeling that this is a record, a testimony – the global spread of the stories adds to this.
But there are also plenty of more domestic moments, times when the taut, precise prose and quirky incidents described in minute detail reminded me of Raymond Carver: couples who realise in the quietest of ways that something is not right, characters whose tension is released with hints of violence and also humour. It is a cliche to say that a short story collection covers the whole spectrum of human experience, but Bullock certainly approaches this, offering up tightly constructed narratives that feel entirely real, and are varied enough to display her enormous talent with the written word.
Emily Bullock is a writer who has been added to my ‘must read everything they write’ list – I will be picking up her debut in the new year, and keeping a close eye out for what comes next. If you are a fan of sharp, insightful stories that hit hard but are also laced with tenderness, you’d do very well to get hold of this stunning collection.
But there are also plenty of more domestic moments, times when the taut, precise prose and quirky incidents described in minute detail reminded me of Raymond Carver: couples who realise in the quietest of ways that something is not right, characters whose tension is released with hints of violence and also humour. It is a cliche to say that a short story collection covers the whole spectrum of human experience, but Bullock certainly approaches this, offering up tightly constructed narratives that feel entirely real, and are varied enough to display her enormous talent with the written word.
Emily Bullock is a writer who has been added to my ‘must read everything they write’ list – I will be picking up her debut in the new year, and keeping a close eye out for what comes next. If you are a fan of sharp, insightful stories that hit hard but are also laced with tenderness, you’d do very well to get hold of this stunning collection.
June 26, 2022
Stories from the Bristol, Bath, and Brick Lane prize anthologies, etc. The pieces are pacy, crammed. I began to think that this book was a find, but after the first few stories, my enthusiasm waned until a final revival, because
* The voice/vocabulary of the first-person narrators is sometimes rather out of character - guessing their age/education would be hard if one merely had their diction to go by. Some similes/comparisons sound rather forced - e.g. "far enough away from the fruit machine that the rattle of silver wouldn't remind him of the sound his settling dentures made when dropped into the tumbler at night".
* Too few templates - e.g. "A glimmer of melting ice" and "Open house" share the same template - the foreground story is punctuated by about 3 memory-joggers (ice, cracked floorboard or phone) which trigger past events. At the end the character wants to meet up with their lost one.
* Many widowers.
A story-by-story write-up is on
* The voice/vocabulary of the first-person narrators is sometimes rather out of character - guessing their age/education would be hard if one merely had their diction to go by. Some similes/comparisons sound rather forced - e.g. "far enough away from the fruit machine that the rattle of silver wouldn't remind him of the sound his settling dentures made when dropped into the tumbler at night".
* Too few templates - e.g. "A glimmer of melting ice" and "Open house" share the same template - the foreground story is punctuated by about 3 memory-joggers (ice, cracked floorboard or phone) which trigger past events. At the end the character wants to meet up with their lost one.
* Many widowers.
A story-by-story write-up is on
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews