Five Go to Switzerland by Nigel Jarrett
Jonathan Lee
Five go to Switzerland is Nigel Jarrett’s fourth collection of short stories. His earlier work has received wide acclaim and has won a number of awards including the Rhys Davies Award. A polymath of the written word, Jarrett has written essays, poetry, and music reviews for a variety of publications.
I learned these details after reading his latest collection of short stories, and suddenly it all made sense. It’s all here, contained within these pages; the poetry, the effortless prose and of course the music.
Jarrett pours his musical knowledge into his characters, most notably the cover story Five Go to Switzerland. Rick, the jazz devotee turned corpse and who “never needed context to understand the power of anything, especially music” (writers, artists, and musos can all relate to it), is an authority on anything involving Charles Mingus, Erroll Garner and Flip Phillips have to do.
Jazz, on the other hand, is – as it always seems – trapped in a completely different world; one of alcohol and women and violence.
synchronicities
Then, in the beautifully titled Edward Elgar rehearses the Powick Asylum Staff Band, we read a reimagined account of the famous composer and his experience practicing the La Brunette quadrille in the asylum.
In this story, Jarrett’s prose undulates and rages along with the piece of music to which it relates. Long paragraphs rush by with poetic flourishes resembling Elgar’s composition.
These synchronicities are an important part of this book; there is a quiet intelligence running through it, a knowledge of a world beyond the fiction drawn on these pages.
You don’t need to know Elgar or Palle Mikkelborg before you start reading Five go to Switzerland but you will surely hear them in the end.
musicality
Music lives not only in the sentences of these stories, but also in the words. The musicality of the prose leaps off the page vibrantly, words dancing across lines like notes blown by John Coltrane’s saxophone.
The building in the Elgar tale mentioned above, for example, “sways to its confident step and is strangely still, its chimneys teeming with gargoyles, these devils protecting the demons within like sentinels appointed by an army of fiendish conquerors.”
Elsewhere, in Wordsworth’s Lake District, there is a journey ‘in the dark on unlit switchback roads’. And in another story, the first semester of high school was “heavy with damp leaffall and rainy evenings, as if it reminded us of the seriousness of what we had undertaken, or of fog and gentle fertility.”
In fact, you could open this book to every page, snag your finger anywhere, and realize you’re only a few millimeters away from a deft twist, a lovely little piece of prose.
And these beautifully crafted sentences serve a purpose, too. At the beginning of the story “Journeys in Lakeland” it says: “There was nothing left to do. No future beckoned. As a prelude to a kind of oblivion, it couldn’t have been better.”
It sets the tone, creates atmosphere, arouses curiosity. This book is full of those moments.
confiscated
It is often said that short stories need to grab your attention from the opening lines. Slow burn doesn’t cut it when every word counts. If at all possible you should actually be grabbed by the opening line. A first sentence so captivating that reading on is a necessity rather than a choice.
Jarrett has this barrel. Try it out; “Staring at the Wordsworth family gravesite at St Oswald in Grasmere, Cyrus Douglass hated even more the demon who had taken his hand, leading him to the back of the chair where Linda-Mo Reeves was sitting and placing it on her right breast “.
Or how about; “There’s a new man in the cafe in Blaizac”.
Or maybe my personal favorite; “It was Rick who first spotted the headless child floating off the pier.”
The first ink to splatter on those blank pages formed the words that drew me in. The rest, I happily discovered, kept me there – line by line, story by story – hooked.
intrigue
Speaking of which, the titles of the stories are another impressive feature of the book. As well as the above titles, names like The Villamoura Long-Distance Sea-Swimming Club, Kandula the Elephant and Incident at the Loch intrigue the inquisitive mind.
The stories in this collection are far-reaching; From the historical setting to the narrative voice to the subject matter, the variation between them is commendable. What unites them all, however, is Jarrett’s passionate style, his love of language and words.
I have a habit of circling, underlining, and making notes in the margins of books I enjoy. I say this firstly to apologize to anyone who should inherit my literature collection when I’m gone, but more importantly to say that my copy of Five Go to Switzerland is enormously decorated.
Each site has something to offer; not only in the telling of these wonderful stories, but also in the way they are told.
Five go to Switzerland by Nigel Jarrett is published by Cockatrice Books. You can buy a copy here.
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