Time is a difficult subject to represent in fiction, though this hasn’t prevented writers from attempting it. In their singular ways, Proust, Joyce and Woolf demonstrate in their novels that how we experience time is different from the ticking of a clock, and that a moment may loom larger in our memory than the decades either side. Short stories, being short, usually focus on a significant incident – there’s no room for before and after.
Ben Shattuck’s stories in The History of Sound sometimes do this, and sometimes span many years – and from one story to another they leap centuries, and back again. Time is less like an arrow arcing into the future and more like a yo-yo, or perhaps a winding continuum, where the past – a grafted fruit tree, the wax cylinder recordings of turn-of-the-century American folk music, a crosscut saw stuck in a tree trunk at an abandoned logging camp – is just around a bend in the river, unseen yet there, as the present is here.
An object in one story becomes a historical artefact in another – stripped of its narrative significance for the finder, but not for the reader. These links make the collection feel like a discontinuous novel. “Yes – oh dear, yes – the novel tells a story,” sighed EM Forster, who knew what he was talking about. But as Shattuck demonstrates here, stories may also tell a novel, though not, perhaps, the sort of novel we are used to reading.
The book’s opening, titular story starts in 1984, with the arrival in the post of a parcel of wax cylinder recordings found in an old house, but it then immediately harks back to 1916, as its elderly narrator, Lionel, recalls his first meeting with a young man, David, who, he now realises, was the love of his life. David went to fight in the war in Europe, but when it was over they spent a summer together in backwoods Maine, tracking down and recording American folk songs. The relationship ends as they often do, petering out as the project is completed. Each returns to his hometown.
After a time, the narrator writes to David’s university seeking contact, only to learn that David has died, that he was also engaged, and the wax cylinders containing all their recordings are lost. But, as the story’s beginning reveals, the cylinders find their way back to the narrator, as does a recording of David’s voice, a message delivered 65 years earlier and finally received. Does this sound sentimental? I guess it does. It’s one of the most moving short stories I’ve read in years.
The History of Sound seems like a complete – even conventional – short story, reminiscent of Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain. (The collection as a whole owes a debt, I think, to Proulx, and especially to the linked stories in her book Accordion Crimes.) But it doesn’t end there. This first story is bookended by the very last story, that of the woman who found the wax cylinders under a trapdoor in the floor of a house she and her husband had bought – and of their relationship, which is another kind of failure.
And so, in the book, soon to appear as a star-studded film, one story leads to another, beginnings turn out to be endings, and endings the beginnings of new stories. There are a lot of memorable characters in these 12 stories, but character is not the focus; nor is plot – though there are enough plots here for a dozen novels.
The focus is the movement – the ebb and flow – of time, and the human sounds that are carried in its current, like a song. Lionel, the old musicologist, puts it better: “The history of sound, lost daily. I’ve started to think of Earth as a wax cylinder; the sun the needle, laid on the land and drawing out the day’s music – the sound of people arguing, cooking, laughing, singing, moaning, crying, flirting. And behind that, a silent sweep of millions of people, washing across the Earth like static.”
The History of Sound, by Ben Shattuck (Swift Press, $36.99), is out now.
