“Not knowing what else to do, I send you walruses.” From its opening line, it’s clear that Moderate to Poor, Occasionally Good is cut from the same cloth as Eley Williams’s previous books – her first story collection, Attrib and Other Stories, and her dazzling debut novel about lexicography, The Liar’s Dictionary.
Williams has quite rightly become widely acclaimed for her comic flair for narrating the strange and often baffling nature of everyday life, when we pause for long enough to allow its full weirdness to reveal itself. The “stories” in Moderate to Poor, Occasionally Good give us little in the way of narrative development, instead offering snapshots in time, the ensuing pages recounting the circumstances that led to a character’s current predicament and emotional state – more often than not, their feeling uncertain, ashamed or aggrieved. We join the narrator of the opening story, for instance, when they respond to a late night message from a prospective lover saying that they are unhappy, not with words of comfort and solace, but with a video link to a live feed showing a colony of walruses at play.
Williams excels at writing a certain kind of character: one who suffers from social anxiety, takes an absurdly rationalistic approach to interpreting other people’s behaviour, obsessively researches any and every minor phenomenon they encounter, has a mind stocked with a plethora of esoteric fact, and, above all, thinks incessantly about the nature of words – their etymological origins, metrical structures, and endless ambiguities. The prose in these stories consequently fizzles with puns, portmanteaus, strangely extended metaphors, and all manner of stylistic high jinks. The punctiliousness or, depending on one’s perspective, pedantry of William’s writing – as when a popped balloon is described as “littering even as it littles itself” – will delight some readers and bore others, as the author is clearly aware. This book is unashamedly written for the first camp of readers.
Williams’s efforts to diversify the characters and narrative scenarios featured in her fiction have mixed results
At least half the stories in Moderate to Poor, Occasionally Good sit squarely within Williams’s comfort zone – arguably too much so. So many characters in this collection so closely resemble one other in their obsessions, predispositions, and sensibilities that we lose any real sense of their distinctiveness and individuality. No doubt many people suffer from the same social anxieties and obsessive tendencies, but the reproduction of more or less the same character type across stories sometimes leaves the collection feeling like less than the sum of its parts. Although the short story form gives free rein to Williams’s comic capacity to draw out the potential absurdity of more or less any everyday interaction, one suspects that much of this material would have been better placed in a novel, where the consistency of narrative voice and characterisation would have been a strength rather than a weakness.
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Williams’s efforts to diversify the characters and narrative scenarios featured in her fiction have mixed results. A short piece that opens with a boy struggling to stay awake as he revises for several exams the next day, followed by a single stream-of-consciousness sentence running to half a dozen pages that captures his semiconscious and then dreaming thoughts, is technically impressive but devoid of emotional interest. Conversely, a story about a friendship between two ex-professional wrestlers that grows over three decades, despite speaking to each other over the phone only once a year (on the anniversary of their famous choreographed final showdown), is an unadulterated triumph, a moving meditation on ageing, regret, and affection that flourishes despite great intervals of distance and time.
Undoubtedly the finest story here is the one that lends its title to the collection. Moderate to Poor, Occasionally Good is a monologue delivered by a BBC shipping forecaster who has gone rogue, taping shut the studio door to prevent intruders and abandoning the script, instead using the broadcast to directly address the partner they know is listening and apologise for upsetting them that afternoon. This intimate yet public address is coloured with a melancholic love, the potential source of which is hinted at in two glancing allusions to a child’s nursery that is no longer needed, that lend to the characteristic punning and wordplay a poignancy and depth lacking in some of the other stories.
The occasional misfires in Moderate to Poor, Occasionally Good are easy to overlook amid so many delightfully comic stories executed with such precision and care. Even in a contemporary literary scene that has newly embraced experimentalism, Williams is a writer with few real rivals for stylistic acuity and invention. Whilst this collection is not as accomplished as The Liar’s Dictionary, it is more worthy of readers’ time than most other writers at their best.
