- Escape Routes, by Naomi Ishiguro. Tinder Press. $32.99.
As the daughter of Nobel Prize winner for literature, Kazuo Ishiguro, Naomi Ishiguro has a lot to live up to with her first book, Escape Routes, comprising a novella and eight short stories.While she acknowledges her debt to her father, she also cites Angela Carter and Neil Gaiman as major influences with their "possibility of magic in the everyday".
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Ishiguro deliberately shuffled the stories in the Escape Routes editing process. As a result, 'The Rat Catcher', a novella, is split into three sections within the collection. 'The Rat Catcher', a dark fairy story, begun during Ishiguro's Masters in Creative Writing course at the University of East Anglia, is set in a Gormenghast type world of castles and abandoned factories.
A rat catcher, summoned to eradicate oversized rats in a rundown palace, is caught up in regal chaos between an eccentric king, who wants to be a simple woodsman, and his enigmatic elder half -sister.The Angela Carter influence is strongest here in a story, which expresses a sense of uncertainty and the desire to escape, sentiments which pervade the whole collection.
In 'Wizards', set on Brighton beach, downtrodden 10-year-old Alfie hopes his life will improve when he becomes a wizard at eleven, but reaching the Hogwarts age may depend on a 28-year-old seaside fortune-teller.
'Shearing Season', set on a remote sheep farm in the English Lake District, follows another young boy Jamie who wants to be an astronaut but finds "the unknown" is closer than he ever thought.
'Heart Problems' tracks the London angst of a young man, "labouring under some kind of unidentified yet all-consuming sickness" and desperately homesick for his small Irish county town. His partner's busy life simply emphasises his alienation in a London of the survival of the fittest.
'Bear' exemplifies Ishiguro's juxtaposition of the absurd and reality, when a wife seeks solace, and surprises her husband, by buying a huge teddy bear at auction, which gradually takes over their lives, but restores their relationship.
In 'The Flat Roof ', Annie, broken hearted after the loss of her partner and child, finds a form of relief by communicating with birds from the roof of her apartment block. The interaction will lead to a Ballardian escape of sorts.
In Escape Routes, except for 'The Rat Catcher', everything is familiar, and yet nothing is quite what it seems, as Ishiguro's fantastic lurks in the margins of the mind
