Mike Fox Book Review by Livi Michael
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Blurred Edges| Ballerini Book Press| Luzern Switzerland 2026| £13.00
First-person narration is not exclusively associated with the short story but it is probably the form where it came into its own, allowing the writer to experiment with notions of the self, perception and reliability. All twelve of the stories in this fine collection feature a first-person narrator as witness, wryly observing, in an apparently direct relationship with the reader. This narrator is used not so much to play with notions of the self as to throw other characters into sharp relief.
Without the writer’s skill and range of empathies this could have been repetitive, but in fact each subjectivity is nuanced and undergoes moments of insight or a shift in perception around which the narration is delicately balanced. In ‘On the Outside of Everything’ for instance, we encounter Owen through a narrator who is initially irritated by him, on the defensive, even mildly resentful. Owen is the only person who calls the narrator by his nickname ‘Bambo’. Ex-army, showing symptoms of PTSD, he used to ‘get into scrapes’ with Bambo but now evinces a ‘friendliness that never quite became attunement’. He seems to represent a certain kind of masculinity, taking the initiative, whereas Bambo, recently bereaved, is more reflective. But Bambo’s perceptions undergo an alchemical change. In a confrontation with three youths Owen, although victorious, looks ‘profoundly tired’. The narrator remembers that at school Owen was always the one who ‘broke up fights, the appeaser, the person who somehow ended up bearing the distress of others.’ At the end Bambo reaches out ‘clumsily’ and puts an arm round Owen who reciprocates in one of the profoundly touching moments that recur throughout this collection.
The apparent intimacy of the first-person narration is undercut by a sense of alienation from people or place, or both. ‘On the outside of everything’ is where most of these characters, by chance, grief, or trauma, are. Like his great-uncle Frank, ‘the outsider’s outsider’, the narrator of the first story does not mind solitude. Which is fortunate because he has inherited a house that is, in itself, ‘a form of exile’. The surrounding landscape shifts with the contours of the sea. It is ‘a place where water became land and land became water’ at the ‘blurred edges of the earth’.
The narrator’s own perceptions are similarly liminal and oblique. What he sees, or expects to see, shifts throughout the course of a story that reveals itself in layers. Peel back the surface and nothing is as it seems. His father, who in his day job sells insurance, is a druid; his mother, who works in a nursery, a white witch. The narrator has always wanted to write and is working on a thesis about creativity ‘perhaps eccentricity is just creative intent in the raw.’
This story was one of the ones nominated for the Pushcart prize and it is easy to see why, with its nuanced explorations of the central metaphor, and its exact prose: ‘A line of eels hung like withered exclamation marks from a cord that traversed his kitchen.’
In other stories layers are revealed with a dry wit. ‘Outliving the Muse’ is an interrogation of creativity and its contradictory relationship to solitude and the need for others, to obscurity and fame. Four friends are linked by poetry, described as the desire to ‘lend even a hint of transcendence to the trudging, splay-footed waddle of the human condition’. When one member of this group, Kip, is offered the laureateship the bruised artistic ego of the narrator is exposed. The friends are now, ‘three people who coveted what we affected to despise.’ What is revealed about Kip, however, is gently surprising. As in ‘On the Outside of Everything’ the narration undercuts the readers’ expectations, subverting the possibilities of cliché.
The narrator tells us that his friends have died now, and ‘even poetry has left’. His story exposes the ‘loneliness of the poet’s life’ as well as its illusions of grandeur. What remains is a melancholy reflection on the connections he once shared.
The observations throughout this collection are piercingly apt. We read, for instance, that ‘hope is a guide dog but without the nous’. In ‘Ashingdean,’ a participant on a retreat strikes the narrator as ‘one of those people who want attention so they can take pleasure in deflecting it’.
‘Ashingdean’ contains an intimate exchange involving no words but which is described as ‘the gentlest moment’ the narrator has ever experienced. In such moments Fox allows the silences to speak, navigating the undercurrents of relationships with consummate skill. His endings are deft and oblique, suggesting that a story cannot be fully told, it can only suggest the strangeness, beauty and necessity of human encounter.