This is my first encounter with Faber’s shorter fiction, having missed his first collection ‘Some Rain Must Fall’. ‘The Fahrenheit Twins’ doesn’t disappoint in its scope and variety. And whatever voice or setting he chooses, Faber excels at sketching in character with telling details.

For example, a brief description of a young woman’s flat and her “empty mugs in various pastel colours” lets the reader instantly know a lot about her in ‘Mouse’. Here, a young computer game-playing geek called Manny is forced to interact with the girl from downstairs when she asks for his help in disposing of a mouse (the mammalian variety). The woman is somewhat obsessive herself with a dodgy New Age religion — which inspires some funny irreverence from Manny. This is a tale of tentative contact told with wit.

Faber is not always a realist, but what he writes about is always very real. In ‘All Black’, a man and his young daughter are returning from a visit with his male lover, who has just ended the relationship — he is jealous of the daughter as the living evidence of a past heterosexual life. As they travel on a coach at night, the man and his daughter become aware that all the lights are growing dim and dimmer. Faber portrays shifting relationships held up to question as the world falls apart in the onset of a mysterious long-term night.

In ‘Beyond Pain’ a drummer for Ayrshire heavy metal band Corpse Grinder — now based in Hungary— becomes ill and has to miss a gig. He ends up with the family of his girlfriend’s family in a small village, having a dance in the local Tavern Blaha. What follows is a well-observed portrayal of cultures not so much clashing, but meeting and grumbling, backing off, meeting again and having a pint together. It shows people having to drop their masks and roles, and meeting with unexpected warmth.

Then there is the title novella, ‘The Fahrenheit Twins’. Marko’cain and Tainto’lilith Fahrenheit are the children of anthropologists living on an Arctic island. Neglected by their parents, they are used to looking after each other and drawing on their own resources. When their mother dies, they are at a loss about how to put their mother’s body to rest — their father leaves the decision to the twins with the admonition “Don’t think too long about it, though.”

They consider eating her — perhaps she might have preferred to be eaten by her own children rather than worms. But no, she’s too big. They decide to take her body on a sledge into the wilderness, to the very edge of their frozen island and wait for a sign for what to do. Their father sends them off with canned goods, thermos and provisions. The twins find that he’d given them the wrong things (no dog food for their huskies), and filled the food hamper with his academic papers and texts.

During this journey they make discoveries about their parents and themselves. This atmospheric story captures how light falls on snow different times of the day, the twins’ first sight of the sea and the sensations of sleeplessness— “a feeling as if their eyeballs had been carelessly left lying about somewhere, and had dried out.”

‘Safe House’ and ‘Andy Comes Back’ are two unsettling stories about homelessness, mental illness and loss of identity. In ‘Serious Swimmers’, a young mother recovering from heroin addiction takes her son on a supervised outing to the local swimming pool. ‘Vanilla Bright Like Eminem’, about an ordinary family returning from a holiday, is a quiet rendering of determining moments in everyday life.

Some stories take the form of dark fables. In ‘Flesh Made Flesh’ a Victorian industrialist with a fascination for taxidermy sets out to literally stuff members of the lower orders and ends up making an exhibit of himself. In ‘The Smallness of the Action,’ a distressed mother “breaks” her baby in progressively more severe ways, while hubby continues to obliviously coo over his “little man”. ‘Someone to Kiss it Better’ features a yob’s succession of fatally incompetent attempts to disguise the murder of his wife. In ‘The Eyes of the Soul’ a beleaguered mother on a bleak estate rents a virtual view to a much better place. There is the broad satire of ‘Explaining Coconuts’ an erotic demonstration of the benefits of the coconut for an audience of sweating executives.

Such stories hinge on some fantastic or exaggerated element and often contain a moral — as in fables. I found these stories less satisfying, though they are well-crafted and the prose as lithe as ever. The characters seem to be there to illustrate a point and this illustrative or symbolic function overshadows the kind of inner lives and dilemmas negotiated by people in stories like ‘Vanilla Bright’, ‘Serious Swimmers’ or ‘All Black’.

I also found that even some of the best stories have a sense of constraint not found in Faber’s longer work. They didn’t feel entirely complete and I was left wanting to know more. ‘The Fahrenheit Twins’ is a well-rounded, illuminating collection that will please confirmed Faber-philes and provide a strong introduction to new readers. However, I’m still looking forward to his next novel!

Rosanne Rabinowitz’s published fictions include stories in The Third Alternative, Visionary Tongue and Roadworks, plus contributions to The Slow Mirror: New Fiction by Jewish Writers and Deep Ten anthologies. Her work is currently showcased in Midnight Street 4 (www/midnightstreet.co.uk), and a story is due to appear in Café Ole: Too Hot to Handle (Independent Persons Press). She has also written reviews for TTA, Interzone and of course, www.laurahird.com. Rosanne lives in South London with a rather demanding 17-year-old cat. Sometimes she works as a freelance sub-editor; other forms of toil have included stints as a life model, oral history researcher, part-time mental health worker and full-time dole claimer. A graduate of the Sheffield Hallam MA in Writing, Rosanne has completed one novel and is working on a second.

© 2006 Laura Hird All rights reserved.