A Flowering Wound - Review

This new-ish Swan River Press collection of John Howard's tales seemed to me like suitable summer reading. Many of the stories concern overlit urban landscapes not unlike those in the stories of J.G. Ballard, though the mood is very different.

Howard is more humane than Ballard, more interested in the minutiae of history. What the two authors do have in common, however, is a refusal to resort of conventional gimmicks to neatly 'round off' stories, preferring to present instead a vision, an incident, a sense of dislocation or doubt.

The stories fall into several broad categories. There are contemporary tales of somewhat alienated and lonely gay men who struggle to make connections. 'A Glimpse of the City' sees an Englishman in contemporary Berlin becoming fixated on a young man who appears in photographs from different periods of the city's history. 'The Man Ahead' is a similarly enigmatic figure glimpsed at a Pride march in Birmingham. 'We the Rescued' explores similar themes in modern Berlin.

More interesting (to me at any rate) are stories that explore the obscurer corners and byways of European history. 'Portrait in an Unfaded Photograph' follows the interesting adventures of Gustav Meyer (later Meyrink) a subject of the Habsburgs who becomes involved in the life of the writer Carmen Sylva, also known as Queen Elizabeth of Romania. An exchange of postcards eventually leads our hero(?) to take drastic steps. But is his conduct mad, noble, or irrelevant? History may not always tell,

'Ziegler Against the World' is set in Weimar Germany, and focuses on stamps. As currency inflation roars out of control, postmaster Ziegler becomes a paper billionaire. But as the fledgling democracy totters towards oblivion his main preoccupation is a book he discovered amid the ruins of the Western Front during his military service - a book by Joris-Karl Huysmans. What is true decadence? And does Ziegler confront it or succumb to it?

'A Flowering Wound' is set in Bucharest during the rise of fascism, and begins with an earthquake. A slight but effective tale, it picks at the tectonic plates of extremist politics. More powerful still is 'Twilight of the Airships', which is a must-read for lovers of dirigibles (we're more common than you might think). In a Balkan city the locals look forward to the flypast by two mighty airships, one German, one Soviet. But the event is not what they expect, as future tragedy is foreshadowed by a tumult in the clouds.

There are also some stories that recall Arthur Machen's approach to London, his insistence that the great metropolis is a place of magic and mystery. Best of these is 'The Golden Mile', in which an innocuous commuter discovers wonders invisible to others in a suburb. There is also 'Under the Sun', in which a strange street is found by a man who may be seeking his true identity.

Considered as a whole this is an interesting and thoughtful collection, one to sample carefully rather than devour in a series of quick gulps. The beautiful cover by Jason Zerrillo and Meggan Kehrli, a modernist cityscape suffused with golden light, captures the luminosity of the contents.