Continent: Stories

By Jim Crace

In this award-winning collection, the world is “skewed just enough . . . to make us see our own world more clearly. . . . brilliant, provocative and delightful.” (TheNew York Times Book Review).

Jim Crace’s internationally acclaimed first book explores the tribes and communities, conflicts and superstitions, flora and fauna of a wholly spellbinding place: an imaginary seventh continent. In these seven short stories, Crace travels a strange and wonderful landscape: “Talking Skull” takes the reader to a tiny agricultural village renowned for the sexually-charged, mystical milk of its calves; “Electricity” introduces a remote flatland region where a monumental ceiling fan changes an entire town’s attitude toward modernization. From the acacia scrub of the flatlands to a city bazaar jammed with vegetable stalls, tourists, and beggars, Crace’s invented world is as fabulous as it is eerily familiar.

“Crace has invented epigraphs, cities, landscapes, even an entire landmass. The idea, of course, is the first faith of fiction: What matters most is what we hold in our minds.” —Los Angeles Times

“Hard and actual in observation, clearly and richly imagined, remarkably original.” —The Guardian

“This is stunningly powerful, visionary writing.” —Publishers Weekly

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jun 13, 2017
• ISBN: 9780062662446

Jim Crace

Jim Crace is the prize-winning author of a dozen books, including Continent (winner of the 1986 Whitbread First Novel Award and the Guardian Fiction Prize), Quarantine (1998 Whitbread Novel of the Year and shortlisted for the Booker Prize), Being Dead (winner of the 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award), Harvest (shortlisted for the 2013 Man Booker Prize and winner of the International Dublin Literary Award and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize) and The Melody. He lives in Worcestershire.

Book preview

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Epigraph

There and beyond is a seventh continent—seven peoples, seven masters, seven seas. And its business is trade and superstition.

Pycletius

HISTORIES IV, 3

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Epigraph

Preface

I: Talking Skull

II: The World with One Eye Shut

III: Cross-Country

IV: In Heat

V: Sins and Virtues

VI: Electricity

VII: The Prospect from the Silver Hill

About the Author

Credits

Copyright

About the Publisher

Preface

During the early 1980s when the seven component parts of Continent were being dreamed up and assembled, I was working as a freelance journalist with no plans or even a desire for leaving fact for fiction. Any reputation I had among the publications who regularly called me up was not based on my authoritative voice or my depth—or even width—of knowledge but on my workaday reliability. I could be counted on to tackle any subject thrown in my path, to become a shallow expert in a week or two, and then turn in clean, committed copy before the deadline. I also had the advantage of living in Birmingham, far enough away from London to be considered by metrocentric editors their local correspondent in the north, the east, the west and all points in between. Cornwall, Scotland, and East Anglia were my backyards, in their deficient view. Isn’t that what living in the English Midlands meant?

So I was kept busy and I made a decent if undistinguished living out of being provincial and dependable. Besides, I liked the life. Faking a different shallow expertise twice a month was my idea of fun. But if I had a future as a journalist, it could not be a long or rosy one. Already, the golden age of weekend color supplements which valued photojournalism and solemn, lengthy essay pieces was coming to an end in favor of celebrity profiles and fashion spreads in which even I was not prepared to forge a professional interest. A newly arrived editor at the Sunday Telegraph Magazine informed me that the sober articles I’d just delivered—about intractable wildlife mysteries—were not her sort of thing. Her ideal cover story, she said, would be The Rise and Fall of the Shoulder Pad. That was when I knew that very soon I’d have to look elsewhere for a living.

Then I had no choice. A long, deeply researched piece I’d written about the aftermath of the Tottenham riots and the two associated deaths was spiked—pulled at the final moment, in fact—by the Sunday Times editor, Andrew Neill, for what the gossip columnist Peterborough called quasi-political reasons. Its place was taken by a six-page fashion spread. Now, apart from book reviews, I was almost out of work.

However, I did have one commission I could fall back on. In the midseventies I’d published a single short story called Annie, California Plates, a metaphorical homage to hitchhiking. It appeared in The New Review—the richest and most prestigious literary magazine of the time—and it was then picked up by other magazines and widely anthologized. Publishers beat a passage to my door—or they would have done if only Birmingham had been a stop on the London tube network. Mostly they phoned and required me to make the journey south. Only one of them was prepared to risk the world beyond the metrolands and travel to Birmingham to begin what was to become a lifelong association. This was the young David Godwin, the celebrated literary editor and agent, then working for Heinemann. He offered me a contract for a novel, any novel, with a payment up front of £1,500. I was not accustomed to his world. I was used to the Send It Now of journalism and not his patient Take Your Time. He was asking to be robbed. I knew enough about the world of books to understand that hardly anybody made a living out of them. So I spent the publisher’s advance (on camping equipment, as I recall) and did exactly what David had advised. I took his money and I took my time. But I didn’t write a word. For years. Of course, I had to pretend once in a while, when David called, that things were going very well, but slowly. There isn’t any rush, he said again, though not by now with much conviction.

But once the shoulder pad began its grim, relentless rise and my career as a journalist sank beneath its weight, I had no excuse but to sit down at my manual typewriter and give fiction a proper shot. At first I tried to write the kind of realist and political novel I admired myself (Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath was my template), but pretty soon I recognized that I was singing in a stranger’s voice. The barrel I was scraping was an empty one (if I’m allowed to mix my metaphors). Then I struck lucky. I’d been asked to review a batch of novels for The Sunday Times. One of them was Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s In Evil Hour. I’d not encountered any magic realism before. I recognized at once its power and its inventiveness but felt no awe for it, not because Marquez was anything other than a master of the form but because the form itself was so much like the person I preferred to be when not on duty, when not the servile journalist who really ought to never even stretch a fact. Making things up Marquez-style was, along with faking expertise, my natural singing voice.

However, if I was a liar-cum-storyteller by nature and by impulse, I was a puritanical one. I had already lived for a period in the Sudan and Botswana and had traveled across Africa, the Indian Ocean, the Levant, and Latin America; all powerful experiences and politically delicate. I wanted to write about the interfaces I’d encountered between the south and the north, or what were known then as the developed and the third worlds. But there were pitfalls. Fiction—especially the fiction by white men about Africa—had too often been distorting and harmful, using the continent as a blank page on which to foist European dysfunctions: here, among their pages, were the brutes, the horrors, and the savage hearts of darkness. Surely, with inventive Marquez at my shoulder and decent Steinbeck marching at his rear, I could shake off the grubby grip of Conrad and write a work of fiction that did not besmirch any landmass that could be found on actual maps.

So I began work on Continent, set in a parallel world which I hoped would seem as real as anywhere on earth but absent from the atlases, meaning it at first to be the conventional, plotted novel Heinemann had paid me for. But I had never written anything much longer than five thousand words before and so casually, unthinkingly, I found myself producing a patchwork of linked, shorter pieces, stylistically reinforced more by my experience of journalism than my exposure to the short-story structure. And it was easy. The stories tumbled out onto the page and truly felt as if they formed a patchwork of different colors but made out of the same material. All I had to do was add a spurious and entirely invented epigraph from the nonexistent Pycletius to give the book a fake pedigree and I was set to—this was thirty years ago—put it in the post. When David next phoned, I could honestly report that Continent was on its way.

When Continent was published in 1986, I relished my copy of the finished hardback; there’s nothing quite as sweet as squeaking into print. But as for sales? I was not expecting any sales. I hadn’t written Continent for sales or even in the hopes of much success. In truth, I’d written it because my Heinemann contract said I couldn’t keep their money if I didn’t. So I was grateful but unconvinced when the Irish-born British publisher, Geoffrey Mulligan, on acquiring paperback rights for Continent, claimed (correctly, given this Ecco Press edition) that it would still be in print in thirty years’ time. Looking back and comparing that first published book with the ten that would follow, however, I am bound to say that either I have learned nothing in those intervening three decades or the voice I found by luck and chance for Continent has proven its longevity by hardly changing or evolving. I was a solemn moralist back then, relying on fabulism, metaphor, and rhythmic prose instead of those more common conventions of contemporary English fiction-realism, irony, and an idiomatic tone. And I remain the same today. But at the time, I thought I knew the world of books sufficiently to more accurately predict a lesser outcome than thirty years in print for what, after all, was the slimmest of volumes and one which could reasonably be dismissed as an assortment of stories pretending to be a novel, a worm behaving like a snake.

As it happened, I was fortunate. Continent was accepted generously as something more coherent than just a gathering of random pieces, more than the sum of its seven parts, exactly as I’d hoped. In one astounding week which endowed me with an enduring sense of optimism about the world of publishing, the book received three prizes: the Guardian Award, the David Higham Award, and the Whitbread First Novel prize, and American rights were purchased by Harper & Row’s Ted Solotaroff for enough money to spring me free from what by then had become the prison of journalism.

The critics were divided, as they always are and always would be where my fiction was concerned, but at least I was heralded as strange and new (though not young exactly; I was already forty) and unEnglish; an oddity, in other words. Some commentators found it difficult—and many still do—to distinguish between the playfulness of my novels and what they took to be their unembarrassed seriousness. I was especially satisfied to read in the Toronto Star that Pycletius, my phantom epigraphist who had departed my imagination equipped with nothing more than his name, was the Greek historian and geographer and (in The Times Literary Supplement) that his works were arcane and irksomely septimal.

Producing fiction was a lot more rewarding and stimulating than I expected, that’s for sure. It was a revelation, actually, and an unforeseen joy. My journalism had been an exercise in assembly and control. Fiction, though, required a looser and more thrilling grip. For Continent I’d had to cede control to narrative itself. But could I make a future out of it? Could I fool the critics once again? I was hesitant, both fearful of the risk and reluctant to slam the door for good on journalism. The most persuasive argument for moving on came one Sunday soon after Continent’s publication when I cycled down to the local greengrocers to buy the vegetables

Reviews for Continent

[bodachliath · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I'm not entirely sure what to make of this first book. Jim Crace is a versatile writer - I have read five of his books and they are all very different. In this one he imagines a hybrid, mostly third world continent, much of which resembles Africa but which also has elements that are more South American and there is possibly a bit of Asia there too. The setting is the only tangible link between the seven short stories that comprise this novella. The stories vary in tone and content, which makes it difficult to grasp the whole and the unifying themes. It is largely about the nature of progress and civilisation, and what is lost in its acquisition. He explores many elements of less developed societies and the ways in which they cope with the new, finding humour in places and darker elements in others. An interesting read but probably not his best work.

[alexbolding · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

First book of Crace, showered by the literary critics with many prizes/awards. I struggled with the seven stories – already the distinctive voice of Crace shines through, but I simply could not place the stories, not in time, not in geography, not in landscape, not in social fabric. At times it seemed a typical development context, a rural outpost in an African colonial setting? Post-colonial perhaps? There is cars, there is electricity, both arrive at the same time in a rural outpost? Only by the sixth story, for some reason, I started to suspect we are talking Australia – Continent. But then no. It is the seventh (virtual) continent and the seven stories are all to do with seven main characters who are ambiguous, hovering between the real and the magical. I like the sixth story about a guy who introduces electricity in the village and installs all kinds of nick-knacks and gadgets in his guesthouse. When the Minister arrives to inaugurate the arrival of electricity and modern times, things go horribly wrong – a huge fan that swings above the crowd at the room’s ceiling winds out of control, supposedly killing many, including the bored Minister who moved to the ‘eye of the storm’, a place of safety in his metier, but not when the fan snaps off… The first story (‘talking skull’) sets a gentrified youth seemingly against his superstitious father, who sells milk from freemartins as a cure for infertility and other ills. The youth acts as quite the rich boy in town where he studies, but is scolded for his stylish way of living back in the village (‘chatter, chatter’). Somehow the boy manages to connect both worlds, reviving his father’s business in a modern touristy way once the latter has passed away. The fourth story (‘on heat’) is almost as impressive as the sixth. It is about a creepy naturalist ethnographer who in the 1920s studies some forest tribe, whose wives happen to be on heat collectively, once every year, when they engage in one big orgy, resulting in a birth wave nine months later. But I feel Crace could have gone even more creepy – the daughter who tells us about the whole story could have been the result of a dalliance, or been an adopted ‘wildling’ child. What can we learn from Crace? Short answer: how to write. In a concise and crisp manner. Close to the voice and skin of a protagonist. Creating an atmosphere of seclusion. Of simple things and grand illusion. Of repetition. Of mantra. ‘My sadness is stronger than your drink. Nothing can relieve it. Nothing. A trace of tin. Nothing’ (from the seventh story on an isolated mining prospector suffering from insomnia).

[hayduke_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A Collection of seven short stories that all take place on a fictitious seventh continent. Things are a little different in this part of the world. Elements of this book still come back to me, like the character that attempts to stop his electric meter from spinning by shutting off items in his house. He doesn't realize what a difficult task this is until he attempts it. Think about it: You shut off all the lights and other obvious items, but then there's the hot water heater, the digital clock on the microwave. The Character decides that it's easier to go in the other direction , so he overloads the power grid achieving a blurred spinning of the meter indicator until it disintegrates.