Jan's Version

The One That Got Away: Thirty Stories from Thirty Years
by Jan Mark
(available at https://janmark.net/new-book-the-one-that-got-away-thirty-stories-from-thirty-years/)

Finishing the last story in the book containing thirty of Jan Mark's short stories - thus ending this year's #JanMARKuary - has left me a different person. The experience of spending every day listening to Mark's voice, always unmistakeable, brisk, honest and bracing, in a variety of guises,  was one that sticks: it's difficult to express quite the precise levels of joy and excitement that these stories have brought me in this, the dingiest month of the year.

#JanMARKuary was set up last year as a personal attempt to get to know a bit more of Jan Mark's work. I read the short story, 'Nothing to be Afraid of', when small and its atmosphere was the thing that made me go back to the stories in the eponymous collection. I read each story during January last year, tweeted a bit about it, then left JM for another year.

In the meantime, Jon Appleton self-published a bumper collection of thirty of her short stories, arranged in alphabetical order by title. (The arrangement is a brilliant success: ordered, clearly, but also 'random' in that no two stories sit side by side by deliberate editorial decision.) Reading one story a day from the second of January and tweeting a general question, so that everyone reading any of JM's books could join in and share the fun, became the ritual. Many of us were reading the short stories volume and the responses, though various, were all drawn together by one large patch of common ground: that JM was an author we all hugely respected and loved. For some this had already been a long-standing attitude, for others it was brand new; for me, it was a wonderful surprise. Surprising, because I realised time is needed to fully appreciate JM's genius. These are stories to be lived with and lived through: there is no short-cutting, and the riches with which Jan rewards her patient readers are, I can now honestly say, life-changing.

Time, though, is something that JM does not waste; you can read one of the majority of these stories in about ten to fifteen minutes. At the same time, neither are words wasted nor indulged, so it's inadvisable to be tempted to rush on to the next. Everything is so sharp, crystal clear, direct: even on a first reading, I found myself feeling that I had just read something utterly perfect. But this perfection never becomes 'clever' (a fairly extensive flurry of tweets around this word, halfway through the month!) nor samey. She never repeats herself: each story a kind of sorbet, intensely and characteristically flavoured -  no need for repetition or expansion, nor any necessity to demonstrate the perfection in the same way again. Each day, I was refreshed by the day's tale, then life would bring me its next course. I could still sense that clarity revealed to me by that bit of JM's wisdom as I went about things: I began to notice more, most strongly the absolutely bang-on ear that she had for speech patterns. The way children speak and the things they say is very close to JM's writing, not just in the dialogue itself, but in the non-sequiturs and elliptical nature of her prose. Sometimes, it's not quite clear - no, that's the wrong word...Sometimes it's not quite usual in the way the story is told, yet everything makes perfect sense when you tune in: JM's stories have their own internal and true logic.

Each tale is a 'version' then of stuff many of us adults know well: disputes, obsessions, family ups-and-downs; but also the things that children know well too: teachers, rituals, stories. Every time you think you've read a story like this before, you are thrown, the carpet pulled very delicately but also very deliberately from under your feet. Many of us #JanMARKuarians delighted in the off-kilter final lines which often make you want to go straight back to the start and read all over again, just for the fun of it!

In this way, Jan is William, the little boy in the very last story of the collection, who will NOT let his gran tell the story of the three little pigs yet again in her boring, 'usual' way. He needs the everyday to be seen through his eyes, owned by him. This is what JM does, every time. Even when you've 'grown cunning' like gran and seem to think you're on to what she is doing, Jan reveals that the story she was telling was actually inspired by her Practical Guide to First Aid or something - at least on the surface - equally  unrelated.

This, of course, is Jan's genius: Jan's Version.