Voices in the Dark
Rachael Fulton, Frankie Gault & Brianne Agnizle
The Common Breath
This review was written prior to the sad death of Brian Hamill. We print it in tribute to the galvanising energy Brian contributed to Scottish literature.
Independent publishers The Common Breath are publishing a series of limited edition literary pamphlets from eight different writers, under the title ‘Voices in the Dark’, with the aim to promote ‘writers we perhaps didn’t know as yet, people writing loud, dark and different work’.
Among the first published is Rachael Fulton’s Witches, a short story which takes the myths, fears and dark history of witchcraft and applies them to the Scottish gran or granny, a character under-represented in Scottish writing yet central to most people’s lives. Fulton’s Gran looks after her family with relish—punishing those who would do them wrong. Even overheard gossip results in brutal retaliation, and future crimes are also taken into consideration. Fulton has great fun playing with the genre of the supernatural, and with more than a nod to the persecution of women as witches in Scotland and beyond, Witches will have you reconsidering your own gran. If you’re honest, you’ll admit this is exactly how they would act if their family were threatened.
Frankie Gault’s Greenock Nine, 1975 is a detailed account of the young Frankie’s first encounter with the prison system. The story is all the more powerful for the matter-of-fact manner of the telling, with events, people, and places recalled with little or no emotion. It reads like the beginning, or near it, of something bigger, bringing to mind Jimmy Boyle’s A Sense of Freedom that similarly introduces readers to a life in confinement. There is no place for the bravado which is often found in such accounts; rather Gault is setting out an introduction to a life behind bars, eschewing mythology and machismo for harsh reality.
Brianne Agnizle’s The Lady On TV Makes Me Feel Bad is the most diverse of the three ‘Voices’, with seven separate pieces, a mix of prose and poetry, and it is the shorter pieces that have the greatest impact. ‘9.15am’ is a perfect example of what can be achieved with even the shortest of stories, managing to tell of a life unfulfilled in a manner which packs a punch in only half a page. ‘Berlin Side Story’ gets to the heart of love and regret with rare insight, and ‘What Little I Know About Colour Theory’ takes an everyday occurrence as an opportunity for mindfulness, or mindlessness, depending on your point of view.
These three examples of ‘Voices in the Dark’ work well in their own, varied, ways, but do leave you wanting more, which is surely at least part of the exercise. What they do prove is that The Common Breath’s aim to find and promote new or marginalized writing is no empty promise. It feels like they are only getting started.
—Alistair Braidwood