And does it matter?
‘Opportunity’ by Charlotte Grimshaw works as both a collection of stories and as a novel of fragments that create a world, a rubik’s cube of possibilities. It reminds me of a pantoum, with the characters cycling and recycling, interacting in ways that continually shed light on them as humans. The writing is character-driven and I found it easy to disappear into their preoccupations and dilemmas.
I admire Grimshaw’s ability to describe the right things with the right amount of detail. Sometimes we want to understand the land when it’s central to the story – the beach, the pine forest, the gorge, the bruised clouds – and other times we need to understand how someone looks – the foul, contorted look, the freckles and bent back. It would be easy to overdo all of this. Detailed descriptions of landscape usually make me lose the will to live but the descriptions in ‘Opportunity’ are both familiar yet unexpected. The characters, too. Someone who presents as obsessive and weird in one story comes across quite differently in another. Sunny characters have their dark side; the unredeemed sometimes surprise themselves.
The title is well-chosen. All the stories, really, are about opportunities – seized, missed, regretted, glimpsed, mangled. My favourites: Pity (a man discovers his ex-wife wants to kill him), Daughters (sad sad sad), and the title story Opportunity (what goes round comes round)…but there weren’t many that I didn’t get something from. Grimshaw’s written other books so I may have to break open the piggy bank.
