Pretty Ugly

by Kirsty Gunn: Rough Trade Books (2024) £13.99

A Review by Lynne Davidson

‘Risk! Risk anything! Care no more for the opinions of others, for those voices. Do the hardest thing on earth for you. Act for yourself. Face the truth.’ These words, from one of  Katherine Mansfield’s journals, kept coming to me as I read Kirsty Gunn’s latest collection of short stories, Pretty Ugly. Katherine Mansfield is a touchstone for Gunn, and just as Mansfield’s stories take us into the sharp heart of a moment: its fracture, its light, its ache, its sudden freedom from constrictions, its glimpse of darkness and horror, the stories in Pretty Ugly do something similar, but with a harder shock, a darker lens. Gunn takes risks; she risks alienating the reader who might want to turn away from the ‘ugly’. I did, at times.

In the stories certain things are brought disturbingly into proximity: the drawer of baby clothes within which ‘nestles’ two guns; well-heeled, well-presented mothers outside their children’s expensive nursery with their shared pornography sites and absent husbands; a kitten in need of rescue and a ‘lonely boy’ about to be ‘shipped abroad’ to war; an elegant ‘wife’ who performs gruesome abortions on herself. It is the bringing into proximity that makes me feel that these stories have similarities to poems; the troubling juxtapositions that somehow activate each other because they hold each other’s shadow, or potential. The stories feel open at their edges, unresolved. I felt drawn to the skill and reach and daring of these stories, and at times repulsed by their darkness. In one interview Gunn described the stories as like chocolates, you choose the most delicious looking one and you bite into it, and then the flavour is (she just pulled a face). Proximity again, delicious and foul, pretty and ugly.

I know that the prize-winning story ‘All Gone’ received a mixed response in New Zealand. It’s terrible ending, with the mother killing both the Pakistani child her daughter had befriended, and her own daughter, is deeply shocking. It is a story about a racist person (to put it mildly), who is also a psychopath. This story is a bit too ‘ugly’ for me. I can’t read horror. I have no appetite for brutality. But thinking about horror makes me start wondering if it is the fact that Gunn is a woman that caused some of the negative reaction to this story. If Stephen King had written ‘All Gone’ (different genre, different gender), would the story and the writer have become tangled in readers’ minds?

There is little comfort in looking back, or returning to past places in Pretty Ugly. The past feels as untended, as lost, as the present. In ‘The Round Pool’ a man in a moment of loss in his life, wants to revisit the pool where, as a boy, he fished with his father. But this beautiful part of the Highlands is now fenced off, a ‘private road.’ This doesn’t deter the man, who in his desire to get there, tramples down razor wire. But when he arrives the pool does not offer solace. The land doesn’t come alive for him as it used to, the river and its fish are not well, and the memories that return are complicated. In the story ‘“It is lonely being a young man sent abroad to fight,” she said.’ the protagonist returns to a previous home to see that a ‘once pretty little sitting room’ is now ‘like no kind of room I’d ever been in before in my life, no kind of room anyone could live in.’ It was cluttered with unpacked boxes and military boots and a StairMaster and a rowing machine. Going back, the stories suggest, can be a kind of horror. It is in the imagination, they suggest, where possible restoration lives.

In ‘Poor Beasts,’ one of several stories about the end of a way of life in the Highlands, the narrator describes visiting old friends who have worked on a Highland Estate for decades, but are now about to lose their position because one of the ‘big outfits’ have bought up the land. But the people who have cared for the land over time hold the stories and the knowledge, which includes knowing how to cull deer humanely, unlike the new owners who will shoot deer randomly from a helicopter. One morning, at sunrise, the narrator sees deer pouring ‘like water’ over the hill and towards the house, ‘As though the deer were going to run straight through the walls of the house and into the kitchen and all around me in one great rush of movement, onwards, forwards, the house as invisible to them as the river had been …’.

The agency of land, land loss, belonging and alienation run through the book like rivers. ‘King Country’ is a brilliant story about the ‘act’ of belonging, performed by a man for his family, and about how the land can say ‘yes’ to you, while the community says ‘no.’  

The stories also play with the idea of a blur between fiction and memoir – the narrator is often a writer who comments on techniques used to draw people in to a story. In the last story called ‘Afterword: Night Scented Stock,’ The protagonist is returning home after attending a reading from the book, Pretty Ugly. She looks, aghast, at the bouquet that is waiting for her at her front door, with its ‘Great fatted chrysanthemums,’ ‘thistles’ and the ‘many greasy hearts of lilies.’ It is almost beautiful, and she holds it tenderly like a baby, but it is really slowly rotting, and from this rotting bouquet, she makes soup (for whom?). But don’t expect resolution. The exquisite, the champagne-and-roses sort of upper middle exquisite, carries its shadow. The small town carries its shadow. Racism washes through all of the places from London to Scotland to New Zealand. The rotting bouquet with its vegetal smell is held up to our face. It is not always comfortable to be part of the dynamic of these stories; to have to meet these moments in their prettiness and ugliness (both disquieting) and make our own decisions about them, if we can.

The organisation of sentences and paragraphs are also designed to unsettle. Gunn often starts with the end of a story/scene/moment/ memory and then moves backwards to show what lead to it. This retrospective unfolding keeps reminding us about cause and effect, and stops us 'getting lost' in the story – an idea that Gunn vehemently rejects, for her work at least. Here’s an example from ‘King Country’:

‘…by the time Mr Carter called us into the room with the guns to tell us we were going into the bush with him it was already too late. The time had passed long ago before bringing a truck-full of kids with him might have made a difference to men’s minds made up. They were ready and waiting for him by the time we arrived in sight of the dirt track. We turned the corner, and there they were.’

These narrative returns are a feature of Gunn’s work. I think of the gorgeous, looping, musical returns and repetitions in her novel, The Big Music, which opens like this:

The hills only come back the same: I don’t mind, and all the flat moorland and the sky. I don’t mind they say, and the water says it too, those black falls that are rimmed with peat, and the mountains in the distance to the west say it, and to the north…

In Pretty Ugly the repetitions gather place and thought and resonance together, and then sometimes disperse them. Sometimes the repetitions are a kind of stuttering or fracturing, and at other times almost a litany, a gathering up. ‘Flight Path’ is about a time in the near future when the Highlands are bristling with wind turbines and birds are a rare sight, and a group walking through the bristling land see ‘the annunciation of a white feather on the road.’ And then something magical happens, and like the deer that pour over the hill in ‘Poor Beasts,’ the birds fly, the repetitions gathering and dispersing this moment of beauty and terror:

We’d thought we were going to die. It was impossible to breathe, the sense of an almighty motion all around us, stifling us, and the beat of wings behind and above us, around us and in front of us…an endless flight, it seemed, of these living things, these actual flocks of birds that were upon us and around us […] as though there was nothing else to exist in the world, as though there could be nothing else, no person, no turbine, no piece of ground nor air, only this rush of terror and horror and wonder and beauty, and heaven and hell....

The art of horror is to take reality, and tilt it. I was in a café in Edinburgh recently, and in the display cabinet was a delicious-looking sandwich. I glanced at the description label and read ‘rotted flowers’! I blinked a couple of times and looked again and read ‘roasted peppers’. Perhaps, I thought, I need some distance from Pretty Ugly. But also, at such a moment as the one we are currently living through, maybe we need stories like these that don’t allow us to become ‘lost’ in the reading, but rather provide vivid encounters with reality and its tilt.