Book review: Untethered by Philippa Holloway

Imogen Davies

Untethered is a collection of eleven short stories that shines a light through the prism of the natural world.

Each story captures the refraction of a different coloured beam, illuminating nature, both human and animal, from various character perspectives and themes such as motherhood and modernity.

The collection carefully examines the relationship between the natural and modern world, how humans interact with nature and how they react when nature diverts from its regular patterns, like when a flock of starlings falls dead from the sky, an octopus washes up a shore, or a bird leaves seven teeth on the back doorstep. Holloway asks readers what we would do faced by nature’s oddities, or if we would even notice in the first place.

Sensitive

Holloway’s characters are observers, sensitive to the movements of the natural world, they prove themselves empathetic towards all forms of life. Evident from the first story, A Cloud of Starlings, Siân and Dan represent figures of care, Siân, who works in a hospital, and Dan, an ambulance worker. We see how their instinct to care, working in environments of human life and death, also extends to the animal world, as they return home from work distressed to find “an entire flock” of starlings “fallen from the sky” in their hedgerow lane.

We see the urgency of this instinct to care for animal life in the second story, Beached, where a passerby comes across an octopus washed up ashore as “the tide is going out, and with it the chances of survival”. The protagonist “can’t just walk away”, with no one else around to help, they singlehandedly attempt to prevent the inevitable, or at least, delay the inevitable until the tide turns.

Each story calls for readers to care, to become an attentive mother figure, turning the concept of “mother nature” on its head, as if to suggest that humans must now be the ones to mother nature during this time of climate crisis and increasing lack of respect for the natural world.

Holloway depicts modernity’s looming invasion in the distant nuclear power station, its floodlights “competing with the sunset”, or the prickle of barbed wiring “like vicious fungal growth along the length of the [window] sill” where an office worker once used to leave breadcrumbs for the birds, giving the overall impression that humans have made the world uninhabitable for other forms of life.

Gritty

The mother figure appears in various forms throughout this collection, from Samira Panahi, a single mother of two, forcefully evicted from their home in Handprints, to a new mother in Un/determined which begins moments after her caesarean, “You are still being stitched up as the doctor comes back in”. This story depicts the gritty details of childbirth that are often erased form the narrative, like the “shame” of “being seen with your legs apart” as “your breasts are leaking yellow stains onto the hospital gown”.

Through using the second-person perspective, Holloway compels readers to step directly into the protagonist’s viewpoint, inviting them to vividly imagine the experience as if it was happening to them.

Given that there are very few accounts that detail the female experience of childbirth in the literary cannon, as Jane Austen, the Brontës, and Virginia Woolf, among others, never had children, Sylvia Plath is one of the few female writers in the cannon to be a mother, more significantly, a single mother, writing about motherhood, in poems such as Morning Song and Lesbos, Holloway’s writing of childbirth is a significance hallmark of 21^st century literature.

Characterising her writing as more modern still is her approach to gender in light of recent societal shifts that distinguish gender from biological sex. As the new-born baby in Un/determined cannot be identified as male or female by its genitals, the couple are challenged to name and raise the child in a world that is not divisively blue or pink.

Here Holloway shines a light on an aspect of human nature that has traditionally been moulded from birth, advocating instead that an upbringing should be free from the confines of gender stereotyping imposed on us by the biology of our birth.

Meaning of home

In writing about children, as several children are central to some of the stories in this collection, Holloway considers the influence of a child’s upbringing and environment. From the sheltered homeschooled siblings in Another Place, to the abusive parenting witnessed by the neighbour over the fence in Seven Teeth, Holloway explores the meaning of home.

The short stories in this collection combine to suggest that Earth is nature’s home and modernity has left no place for it, as if forcefully evicting nature like the family in Handprints. As a result, the natural settings for the stories in this collection become symbolic of how humans treat the land they live on.

Most of the stories are set in a rural landscape that is reminiscent of Wales, a farmhouse at the end of a hedgerow lane surrounded by fields and sheep or the setting of sand dunes gathered along the coast, these landscapes not only echo a Welsh setting, but are populated by Welsh people, with character names like “Siân” in A Cloud of Starlings, or “Morgan” in Another Place, a Welsh name meaning “dweller of the sea”, reiterating the connection between people and nature.

The only story that is incongruous to this patten is The Weight of a Shoe, set in Minnesota, with commercial references to “Walmart” and “Target” which seem far removed from the whimsical natural settings of the other stories. Having said this, the presence of a commercial America in The Weight of a Shoe creates a stark comparison between the natural settings of the other stories, and goes to reinforce the importance of noticing nature, of paying attention to other forms of life, in such a saturated modern world.

Symbolic

The final story of the collection, The Message, blurs the natural and domestic landscape as a bird mysteriously finds its way into the protagonist’s house, echoing the human invasion of the natural world. However, in this story, Holloway asks readers to do more than simply notice nature and step into the role of a mother figure to care for it like the previous stories have implied. Here, Holloway encourages readers to see animals as more than just life, but what they represent, the symbolic weight that humans have assigned to them.

The protagonist of The Message contemplates the symbolic meaning of birds; “peacocks can symbolise pride”, “eagles symbolise freedom” and “a bird flying into your home is a sign of an impending message or an impending death”.

This ominous feeling pervades the collection like the looming threat that shadows modernity if we don’t begin to care for the natural world. Holloway calls for readers to act with the same urgency as the passerby on the beach, doing everything they can to save the life of an octopus washed up a shore.

Untethered by Philippa Holloway is published by Parthian. It is available from all good bookshops.