Book review: Borrowed for a Short Time by Tyler Keevil

Jon Gower

Based on his own experiences of settling in Wales after moving from Canada, Tyler Keevil’s latest collection of stories straddles both countries.

So we have bright-lit snowboarding adventures in the highlands overlooking the city of Vancouver melding into vivid accounts of finding love in mid Wales.

They also bridge life and art in terms of form, often taking the shape of autofiction. So moments in the author’s life are run through the fiction-maker’s machine, often with a healthy lubrication of imagination.

In service of this, the prose is often down to earth and realistic – imagine Raymond Carver writing about Llanidloes or Caersws – such as in the opening account of a man working a jigsaw in a Powys workshop who has an accident which sends metal shards called swarf into his eye.

It’s certainly not one for the squeamish, or for anyone who is discomforted by all the eyes and blindings in Shakespeare’s King Lear, but ‘Swarf’ is a powerful start to a tremendous collection of tales. They have lots of verbal vim and vitality and, like all good fiction, veins of abundant truth running through them.

Dramatic sequence

The stories therein are formally arranged as a two-part play, complete with a prologue, an interlude and an epilogue – because many of the short fictions in Borrowed for a Short Time hinge on the goings-on in a local theatre company.

They visit a school in Machynlleth where an evening show is disrupted by some pupils who have been expelled for bad behaviour. They attend a rather unsuccessful community event to mark International Women’s Day where nobody signs up for their workshop about Antigone. There is a racist altercation in a hotel bar in Harlech. And, worst of all, the Arts Council axe drops on Theatr Taith’s funding and, with it, the final curtain.

Many short stories depend on a sense of place, of location, for part of their power – think of Rhys Davies’ Rhondda, Annie Proulx’s Wyoming or Kevin Barry’s west of Ireland – but many of Keevil’s stories are about dislocation as this displaced man from Canada tries to make sense of Wales even as he tries to find his place in life.

This rootlessness is even more apparent when stories happen in a snowstorm or in the darkness, such as ‘Owl’, which has them both, as it tells the story of looking for a barn owl in the woods near the switchbacks and hairpin bends near Llangurig after it has been knocked down by a car.

Nestling at the heart of the collection is a story called ‘Instars’ – for my money, my Canadian dollars, the standout tale in a very strong assemblage.

It’s a brilliantly crafted and beautifully observed story about family reunions near a Canadian lake and shows the author most at home when writing about his native country. It’s a story of metamorphosis, with plenty of rusty-coloured insects and oodles of local detail such as the doily-sized green mosquito coils whose acrid fumes are mildly toxic ‘but like the dry scent of the pine needles, the freshness of the lake, or the heady reek of boat gas on the docks, it was a scent I associated with summer, with the cabin, with the family.’

The lake itself, Lake Alma, is similarly evoked by Tyler, with its shoreline dotted with cottonwoods and water which had ‘a clean water clay smell to it. It was clear as liquid glass and I could see to the sandy bottom, which wasn’t choked with milfoil like some of the other lakes of the interior.’

This story is simply top-class stuff, as if a whole novel has been concertinaed into forty pages of pellucid prose.

Tragic loss

The dance choreographed by Keevil between fact and fiction is always an intriguing one to watch, and this is most powerfully true in another story concerning something precious being lost.

In ‘The Search’, a group of locals set off under police guidance to search for a little girl who has gone missing. The story is clearly based on the tragedy of April Jones, who went missing near Machynlleth, and is made all the more poignant by knowing how that tragic tale ended in real life.

North African interlude

There’s one story which takes us away from both Wales and Canada, namely ‘All the Little Children’, which is set in Morocco. It has passages of marvellous evocation, such as this bright sketch of the city of Essaouira, with its labyrinth of whitewashed towers and apartment blocks:

Between the balconies stretched dozens of laundry lines, so thin they looked like gossamer, barely visible. On the lines hung sun-bleached shirts and trousers and tunics, drifting in the wind, eerie and ethereal. Just outside the town wall lay a dirt football pitch, where teenage boys streaked back and forth in the dusk, shouting to each other and dragging long shadows behind them.

Emotionally charged and confidently told, Borrowed for a Short Time is about negotiating a way, or finding ways, into a new country as it also follows the course of love from first date through marriage into the uncharted territories of parenthood. Tyler Keevil maps this course with surefooted confidence and a demonstrable, ready gift for telling a true tale.

Borrowed for a Short Time by Tyler Keevil is published by Parthian and is available from all good bookshops.

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