Eunkyung arrives in Britain alone. Her mother has sent her to live with her aunt, Narae. Coming from Seoul to live in a small Welsh village, the uncomfortable truth about her mother very slowly reveals itself and Eunkyung desperately wants to hide from it. She has run off in the moonlit night and tucked herself away at the foot of the lighthouse, two days after Christmas, in the snow, thinking over the three months in Britain and the disturbing memories of her life with her mother in Korea.Rebecca F. John writes with an acute eye, and ear, and even nose. The sensory delight in reading her short stories is heightened by the intimacy with which she brings each character to us. As readers we are right there, sitting in the snow, in the shadow of the lighthouse, the air still and cold, the gentle waves bubbling and popping on the rocks below, the moonlight silvering everything around us. And we feel Eunkyung’s isolation, loss and bewilderment. And also the sense of hope that the kind and solid Narae and her husband, David, are slowly instilling in her.‘English Lessons’ is the first story in this fine collection. From there you will travel to an asylum where a ‘glovemaker’ sits for her photograph. She’s leaving tomorrow; being returned to her husband who had her put in the asylum in the first place. But she’s only hanging on by a thread, converting everyone around her into numbers, counting and counting, trying to avoid thinking of the incident that was just too much for her to cope with. The stories loop through time and place. You will be a young woman standing naked on a stage, looking down through the lights to where the married father of your child watches you, and you can only bear the situation by imagining yourself dressed as a clown. You will be in nineteenth-century poverty with Bernie, working as a runner for ‘gentlemen’ placing illegal bets, running through shadowed, dangerous streets. And in another story you will be painfully, agonisingly facing up to the fact that the child who vanished from your life ten years ago, when she is returned miraculously, is not your child any more. All the grief and agony of that loss do not make a relationship between mother and child.In each story, John creates multi-faceted, absorbing characters and situations. Her imagination is phenomenal, and the dexterity with which she draws us into each of these contrasting lives and worlds is compelling. This is a collection which effectively demonstrates that, in Rebecca F. John, a new and very considerable talent has stepped onto the literary stage.
