The Garden of Bad Dreams
Christopher Hope
The Garden of Bad Dreams
A collection of short stories from Christopher Hope: a conjurer of strange places and displaced people. From the story of the entertainer who is compelled to collect small people, to the monk who pushes away a mountain from his monastery, we are confronted with characters who could have been plucked from a fairy tale and yet are very much part of our own world.Transporting us from the Malaysian highlands to an Ex-Servicemen's Estate in Badminton, from a zoo in the midst of a civil war to a forested hillside in central Serbia, "The Garden of Bad Dreams" is a constantly surprising, highly addictive mixture of the absurd and the darkly familiar.
4.8 out of 5 based on 4 reviews
|
Omniscore:
|
| Classification |
Fiction |
| Genre |
Short Stories |
| Format |
Hardback |
| Pages |
144 |
| RRP |
£12.99 |
| Date of Publication |
May 2008 |
| ISBN |
978-1843547723 |
| Publisher |
Atlantic |
| |
A collection of short stories from Christopher Hope: a conjurer of strange places and displaced people. From the story of the entertainer who is compelled to collect small people, to the monk who pushes away a mountain from his monastery, we are confronted with characters who could have been plucked from a fairy tale and yet are very much part of our own world.Transporting us from the Malaysian highlands to an Ex-Servicemen's Estate in Badminton, from a zoo in the midst of a civil war to a forested hillside in central Serbia, "The Garden of Bad Dreams" is a constantly surprising, highly addictive mixture of the absurd and the darkly familiar.
Reviews
The Guardian
Jan Morris
“Hope is a consummately skilful novelist, and he seems to have written these 13 stories as a kind of display case or sampler of the genre... there is no hint of uniformity. They might almost be by 13 different authors, and they show a virtuoso command of styles, settings and subject matter, as if to demonstrate what a modern short story can do. Reading them is like undertaking a journey of literary exploration, never sure where we are heading, or just what is happening to us... Strange stuff: uneven, tantalising. But Hope knows his business; knows all his accents and territories, too, and there is never a line that is dull or unconvincing. As a display of the genre it is exciting. Whether it is any more than that - whether there is any cumulative symbolism to the stories, whether as a whole the book is brilliant miniature, fairy tale or freak show - I cannot make up my mind. But anyway, Christopher Hope the novelist always has his day job.”
10/05/2008
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The Daily Telegraph
Patrick Skene Catling
“The idiosyncratic, vividly beguiling style is constant throughout... Hope's stories are as tightly focused as poetry, without any sense of uncomfortable constriction. Free from the shape of orthodox narrative, building up to a climax and declining to denouement, they reveal significant moments in extraordinary lives in epiphanic flashes. [Hope] is a virtuoso of the written word.”
26/04/2008
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The Sunday Times
Nick Rennison
“Hope's offbeat imagination creates a volume that is both engaging and unsettling, one that goes some way towards validating the assertion (in the proverb he takes as his book's epigraph) that “danger and delight grow on one stalk”.”
06/07/2008
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The Financial Times
Henry Hitchings
“...the collection seems like a set of ingenious exercises, a sort of writerly callisthenics... Hope's experiments in the genre, strikingly compressed, have the fancifully mocking air of parody, and embody its tight exactness made possible by its constraints... much of the writing feels as though intended for performance. There is something antic and exuberant about it - a mix of the colloquial and the puckishly clever... Hope manages to create large imaginative spaces with fine economy. Enigmatic yet also racy, the dense fragments of The Garden of Bad Dreams are redolent of forbidden sweets and a restless satirical mischief.”
24/04/2009
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