Small Press Dispatch: Single Syllable Symphony

Roseanna Pendlebury The first thing that stands out in Rebecca Gransden’s Figures Crossing the Field Towards the Group, joint winner of the Queen Mary Small Press Fiction Prize, is its prose. Right from the first page, it is obvious something is a little strange here. After a while, it clicks: all of the narrative prose is being delivered in single-syllable words. As the story continues, it is revealed that dialogue is exempt from this limitation, though often strange enough in its own way. The explanation, however, is saved until much, much later. The story the novella tells is, in some ways, a simple one: a girl called Flo journeys across a ravaged British landscape, searching for her brother as an unspecified apocalypse sweeps the land heading north. What makes it more complex is that prose. The artificiality of the syllable restriction, and the way that contrasts with the almost baroque complexity of some of the dialogue, gives a remoteness to the world being described, sometimes…