Male Tears

Benjamin Myers’s intense graphic poetic prose suits the short story genre well, since it then avoids the challenge of combining intensity with a story line. Myers focusses on gruesome violence and dysfunctional lives. Here we have it all – men setting cruel traps for animals which Myers allows to rebound on the perpetrator, a male journalist pursuing his folk singer idol, species extinction, wives driven to suicide, religious abuse, mocking of the disabled, ego-driven crude power in tones of primeval religion, the sad lives of former convicts eked out in damp dark caravans.If Myers’s description of being a man were complete, then it might not be worth bothering. Whilst highlighting the bad, evil and broken in his writing, Myers never includes any virtuous counter-examples to offer a more balanced account, or a vision of an alternative virtue.

The quote at the opening of the book from Germaine Greer sums up the theme to this collection of short stories: 'The tragedy of machismo is that a man is never quite man enough.'Intense, brutal and raw, these stories depict rather unpleasant and base elements of maleness, many set in rural landscapes maybe to depict being close to nature, perhaps. In most cases, these unnamed men are on the edge, not quite fitting in with the modern world and somewhat outdated. Caricatures, resentful, insecure, bitter and a bit like the exhibits in 'The Museum of Extinct Animals' almost. So this is a study about men being with men, men's effect on women, men honouring men, men misunderstanding.Myers is a beautiful writer of poetic prose and it easy to get lost in his words. Reading this eclectic mix of stories is both a pleasure and a disappointment. Very sad, I just hope his next book shows men more joyously. No more tears.

There is little in the way of coherence in this collection of short stories from Benjamin Myers that examines the nature of man and his psyche, which to be honest depicts a largely unpalatable and uncomfortable picture of being male. A number of the stories have been published previously, and the book is a compilation of around 15 years of the author's writings, some can barely be termed stories, so slight as to be of little consequence. Many are inspired by real life incidents and people, but are shaped by artistic licence, so many are raw, visceral, brutal and violent, many set in rural environments. As you might have gathered, I found this collection to be a bit of a hit and miss experience, some of which is deeply upsetting such as a the horrifying use of a gin trap that captures the excruciating suffering of a badger.There is a man operating a mechanical picker, a monster of a machine, and a boy skipping school to spend his time outdoors and in the woods, the wildlife, to learn what really matters, the truth of life and death, a tough read. There is an astronaut having trouble adjusting to normalcy, a man's personal history of a river, the museum of extinct animals, an inverse graveyard for which man is responsible and the steady souring of a relationship between a couple, the bitter and manipulative man of cruelty, a relationship that has a English ending. There is Old Ginger, a legend, a menace, and a sadistic gamekeeper. A male musical journalist interviews an iconic older reclusive female folk singer, her career reduced to one anthemic song, the break up with Simon resulting in a rewriting of history in a male centred business. Vienna features a man willing to do whatever it takes to see Dutch Renaissance artist, Pieter Bruegal the Elder's famous 1565 Hunters in the Snow at a Vienna art exhibition.A fair ride that generates a small fortune consumes a man, captives forced to move stones up a hill ends in what seems to be a more than just ending, a fading writer cannot face the downturn in his fortunes, weaponising music, a torture for the women that grow sick and tired of him. There are many stories in this collection that will appeal to many readers, but I suspect most readers experience will be similar to mine, where some of the fiction will appeal more than others. Many thanks to Bloomsbury for an ARC.

This is the first short story collection from the writer of The Gallows Pole and The Offing, with stories written over more than a decade. They are loosely themed around concepts of maleness, and tend towards the bleak and brutal. There is violence, failure, lashings of dark, menacing atmosphere, and not much to lighten the gloom. Impressive, but I didn't always enjoy it.

This collection of short stories brings together writing from Myers over an extended period - others may have been able to judge when in his development as a writer they fell but it wasn’t apparent to me. The best stories, for me, touch on the tension between man and the countryside (and frequently end badly...), and others consider what it means to be a man. Some grim, some touching, some amusing, and a high hit rate - only one story didn’t land for me, and a couple of shorter stories (a page) achieve more in a few paras than many longer works I’ve read!