Helen Tyson
Slightly Foxed
Standing, like strange echoes of each other, at the beginning and end of Sarah Hall’s short-story collection Madame Zero are two deeply disconcerting tales. Told from the perspective of a husband, both these stories describe apparently contented – if not perfect – marriages that go unexpectedly, shockingly awry. In ‘Mrs Fox’ (winner of the 2013 BBC National Short Story Award), a woman, Sophia, ‘dreams subterranean dreams, of forests, dark corridors and burrows, roots and earth’. Sophia is ‘in part unknowable’ to her husband. One day, he wakes up in their modern town house to find his wife vomiting; the next day, he hears, from the bathroom, ‘the low cry of someone expressing injury, a burn, or a cut, a cry like a bird, but wider of throat’. They go for a walk on the heath and, as the woods thicken, Sophia begins to walk ‘strangely’. She runs, she crouches. As her husband catches her up, he notices that ‘something is wrong’. She turns and runs; then she stops and he is ‘struck dumb’: Sophia has been transformed into a vixen.
In ‘Evie’, a woman who doesn’t normally eat sweets comes home from work and consumes a large chocolate bar. Over the next week, she devours more and more – chocolate, pastries, puddings, fizzy drinks, alcohol. She begins, uncharacteristically, to proposition her husband, Alex, with demands for sex. He
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Sixty years ago today, the Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to enter outer space. @Andrew_Crumey looks at his role in the space race.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/one-giant-leap-for-mankind
On the night of 5th July 1809, a group of soldiers kidnapped Pope Pius VII on the orders of Napoleon Bonaparte. Munro Price looks at what happened next.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/bonaparte-meets-his-match
'She lived in a damp basement with her mother and sister, smoking roll-ups and talking to her parrot.'
Joanna Kavenna traces the life of the 'almost-forgotten poet' Charlotte Mew.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/she-hated-poetry-readings