There is a haunting strangeness to Jo Mazelis’ third collection of short stories, Ritual, 1969; an unsettling mix of recognition and displacement within the sharp-angled, grainy photography of her prose. In nineteen tautly written tales, the award-winning novelist proves once again adept at opening doors onto closed worlds.
Mazelis shows no desire to co-opt our sympathy for her conflicted and downtrodden female protagonists. Nonetheless, she catches and holds us fast in scenarios which are at once liminal bordering on the supernatural, yet wholly real and anchored in the everyday. Indeed, liminality is an important key to this collection. In it Mazelis explores, without succumbing to grimness or inertia, a range of themes around adolescence, death, isolation, abuse and, above all, what it means to be a girl or a woman. Each story is either located in the past, or alludes to one through consequences or the tricks of memory.
‘Ritual, 1969’ is one of five tales which focus on an event in that particular year. However, there is no obvious reason for the date, nor are these happenings directly linked from story to story. Or are they? Is the unnamed ‘dead girl (who is not really dead’ in the opening of ‘Levitation, 1969’ the same girl who is ritualistically held aloft by five chanting others in a seeming addendum to the title story? This latter concerns a ‘teacher, a woman of around forty’ who could just as easily be a portrait of that same, troubled child now grown, disappointed, into a dyspeptic pre-middle age.
Between each of Mazelis’ characters and their tales lies a tapestry of possibility; of similarity and difference linking them and the reader. Time becomes dislocated or held in suspension – just as happens in ritual spaces, which the author evokes in a profusion of ways from the literal to the metaphorical; from faintly macabre children’s games and unhappy ghosts seeking closure to the unending rackets of adult life in which petty-minded gossip gets repeated chant-like unto ennui. Over all hang the cycles of abuse and its counter, survival, which get handed down the generations.
Fathers are everywhere: absent, neglectful, and often menacingly present. In ‘Prayer, 1969’, following his funeral, Mazelis writes of (another?) teacher, ‘As usual the memory of her father took on an almost tangible form.’ In ‘The Green Hour’, a girl meets the painter Rodin and will become his model and lover. Of her first impressions we are told, ‘he reminded her of her father. Except that her father’s gaze came with a disapproving silence.’
Mazelis is deft at suggestion; from phantasmagoric threat to wry social observation, saying much with a few well-chosen words. The eponymous Mrs Dunridge, for example, ‘was extravagant with boiling water. She bathed every day. Her neighbours often commented on it.’ Throughout, there is a catalogue of boredom and uncertainty threaded with despair and a mainly, but not entirely psychological violence. Yet Mazelis’ authorial voice is never bitter or morose, nor do her protagonists become mere passive victims. With an uncanny ability to look sideways at her subject, Mazelis ensures that we remain sceptical of quick judgements or moral assumptions. Her neglected children can be cruel, just as her tyrants can show sudden generosity.
This collection, as with Mazelis’ earlier work, succeeds not only through the succinct beauty of her writing, but because she never allows herself to wallow or preach. A strong sense of play and a stoic optimism underpin the grit á la film director Mike Leigh, blowing fresh air into each, powerfully ambivalent tale: ‘Fail at everything. But listen. Listen. Flowers, leaves, branches all reach for the sun.’

In an interview I conducted earlier this year, Jo Mazelis spoke interestingly about unifying themes that bind short story collections together, commenting that for her it is the author’s style and voice which unites the pieces, rather than a preconceived umbrella-like idea. While the short stories in this third collection by Mazelis certainly shows a developed hand penning prose that rolls like steady, distinct waves across the page, there are unmissable melodies that weave their way into the stories: womanhood, childhood, loneliness, exclusion, missed opportunities, and surface appearances, to name just a few.

More definitively, all nineteen stories are largely told from a female perspective and only a few diverge from third person narration. Whether planned or not, these recurring features combine with an often interior, literary style to give a distinct pitch to the collection – rarely tsunamic in fervour, they nevertheless fluctuate between the curious, the mystical, and the uncanny, leaving the reader bewitched with each unfolding tale.

One of my favourite short stories in this collection, which exemplifies many of the above characteristics, is ‘Velvet’. Skilfully oscillating between the perspective of a mother and various young girls at a birthday party, Mazelis illuminates the almost incomprehensible cruelty of children, their bizarre rituals that include and exclude both their contemporaries and adults alike, and the way seemingly innocuous actions can suddenly attain horrifying significance. There is one particularly brilliant scene in which a girl tries to place a shiny pebble within the cupped petals of a flower:

She picked it up and carefully, almost tenderly, dropped it into the tulip. The result was disappointing; she had wanted to see the stone nestled inside the flower, hunkering down among its complicated innards, its stamen, pistil and anther. No, the result was sudden and shocking. She let the pebble drop from her fingers and the tulip’s head abandoned its ardent and lovely uprightness, snapped at the neck and fell onto the unyielding earth below.

For the next four paragraphs we delve into the thoughts of the young girl, something which Mazelis captures with a poignancy and accuracy rarely encountered and is reminiscent of Virgina Woolf’s mining of the mind.

In the last paragraph of this episode, the girl flees the scene of the crime and this action, this escaping or drifting away is another feature which Mazelis lights upon with some frequency. It begins with the first short story ‘Levitation, 1969’ which ends with the protagonist ‘floating far overhead’ until she cannot be seen, a place where ‘she’s free’ . This continues in the short story ‘Whose Story is this Anyway’ which concludes with a central figure who ‘flew up in the air and only when she fell to earth did she finally know everything’.

There is, in many ways, a sense of transition in these short stories, of a movement from innocence to experience, a point made explicit by the epigraph which quotes the poem ‘The Sick Rose’ by William Blake. Although Mazelis complicates these tensions, the dynamics between men and women in this short story collection reflect the poem and can be traced in ‘Mechanics’, ‘A Murder Stone’, ‘Word Made Flesh’, ‘Whose Story is this Anyway’, ‘Storm Dogs’, ‘Fallen Apples’, and perhaps most disturbingly in ‘Biology, 1969’ which follows a brief, unexpected sexual assault and the depressingly cold aftermath that’s bound in the contexts of the time, but also laced with a psychology that is still, sadly, prevalent today.

Relevant to the theme of innocence and experience, ‘Biology, 1969’ is told from the perspective of a teacher, a trend which permeates the collection. ‘Levitation, 1969’, ‘Prayer, 1969’, ‘Ritual, 1969’ and ‘Undone, 1969’ are all connected by this suggestive environment, as well as their unifying titles.

My favourite among these is the first short story in the collection, ‘Levitation, 1969’ which I first read in the anthology New Welsh Short Stories (Seren, 2015). The opening line demonstrates Mazelis’s ability to hook the reader and then slowly reel them in: ‘Rising up in the air, the dead girl feels . . . dead.’ Tone, atmosphere, character are all meticulously displayed with just a few words.

Perhaps the best first line in the collection is in the mysterious short story ‘The Green Hour’ which reveals the deft touches of beauty Mazelis brings to her sentences: ‘She thought of the sea as her beating heart and so its violence on certain wild nights frightened her.’ This story is one among a small handful which reduce the cohesion of the volume, but are excellent inclusions, being among the most impressive in the collection as a whole. Indeed when a short story like ‘The Flower Maker’ finds its way into a collection and leaves you reading it three times over because it’s so good, the seeming disconnectedness of the piece becomes inconsequential and one is quickly reminded that the only really important factor in any collection is quality writing – something Mazelis provides in abundance. A third reading also has the benefit of revealing those connections that at first seemed obscure. In this case, matters of patriarchy, beauty, poverty, and the interactions of the old and young.

This relationship between generations is further seen in the way the past encroaches on the present, often with a distinctly haunting hue. ‘Caretakers’ is the most overtly ghostly, with little footprints from invisible feet that potter around a sinister Georgian house. It’s a well-placed story priming the reader for later narratives that have their own supernatural signatures.

As just the briefest of brushings with this short story collection reveal, Mazelis explores a dazzling range of ideas, geographies and times, often couched in the daily realities of women and children, the marginalised and the powerless, the scared, hopeless, and hapless. It is a powerful collection which demands attention, denies light relief, drives the reader along the lines with an urgency and perceptiveness that is often surprising. Yet, importantly, Mazelis does not lecture. The author does not stand at the pulpit and wave a knowing finger at the congregation. Instead, she opens doors and says go ahead, have a look, make your conclusions. Read into it what you will.

Ritual, 1969 reveals the absolute mastery Mazelis has over the short form and this third collection is a superb display of a writer keenly attentive to the human mind, its motives and its mysteries.

There is an airless, hermetically sealed atmosphere to Ritual, 1969, the third short story collection from Jo Mazelis that is reminiscent of disorientating late 60’s / early 70’s British film masterpieces such as if… or The Shout. Works that were concerned with the strangeness lying beneath the apparently cloudless, cricket-loving, ever-so-regimented surfaces of British life. It is a book that evokes the tribulations of adolescence and young adulthood with an unsettling intensity which admirers of Mazelis’ previous works will be keen to reacquaint themselves with.

The female protagonists that inhabit these acutely observed stories of angst, lust and small town ennui are all players in a mystery that they cannot quite grasp the solution to. That mystery may be said to be our perception of what constitutes reality, and as such it may be said that the fabric of reality is being constantly probed and tested throughout a collection which, nevertheless, is happy to be as playful as it is philosophical. Indeed, the most obvious comparison to another writer would be to that other lover of equal helpings of the playful and the profound, Angela Carter. Mazelis, like Carter, is evidently attracted to fairy tale and folklore (think not so much of the directly folkloric Carter of The Bloody Chamber but more the bewitched and bewitching explorer of the everyday that wrote The Magic Toyshop and Nights at the Circus). She is interested in imbuing the page not just with quotidian pain and grit (all though there is plenty of that in these stories too), but also with what she perceives as being the innate magic and mystery that exists within the fabric of our lives.

Take the opening ‘Levitation, 1969’, for example. Mazelis examines the realities of day-to-day life (from a disturbed father prone to violent outbursts to a schoolgirl game of levitation) and finds that such scrutiny lends apparently minor or sad events an air of almost beguiling otherworldliness. The schoolgirl protagonist of the story half thinks the broken items that appear in the house are the result of a poltergeist:

The poltergeist at home is getting worse. Last night after she had gone to bed he tore the television set from the stand and jumped on it. She doesn’t know if he was careful to switch it off and take out the plug first. Probably, as he’s always telling them all to do just that.

But in a sense, of course, the father in these rages, has almost become like a poltergeist to his frightened daughter and Mazelis beautifully pinpoints the contrast between the two modes of the man:

the destruction was the work of an angry spirit; the reconstruction was performed by her father, who is often to be found with a soldering iron in his hand.

The girl neglects her schoolwork and is sporadically bullied, however, she enjoys the old game of levitation, for the weightless, almost out of body experience it gives her, and the story ends beautifully – perhaps more the way a poem might – on a moment of metaphorical transcendence:

They are lifting her, higher and higher, to waist level, then shoulder level, then above their heads… Then finally, although the other girls shade their eyes and search the sky they can no longer see her. She’s free.

In ‘Caretakers’, Mazelis takes this otherworldliness a step further, by deliberately playing with the Gothic tradition of works such as The Turn of the Screw and the The Haunting of Hill House. But while the unexplained recurrence of:

wet footprints… running in a line from the bathroom to the fireplace in her bedroom …far smaller than her own. Child-sized naked heel and toe marks…

ultimately lead to the story’s tragic denouement, it is really Mazelis’ depiction of the burgeoning romance between two unlikely, sensitive souls, holed up in a odd old house together, that is the centre of the story.

Mazelis draws her wounded, self-esteem-battered characters with a great deal of sensitivity and perhaps her writing is at it’s most striking in a story like ‘Biology, 1969’, a particularly direct vignette concerning a young English teacher who is groped by a man on the deserted upper deck of a bus:

The places where he’d touched her were all burning somehow, her breast, her bottom, her private parts. She wanted to rub at them, to rub and rub until his touch was expunged. Yet she also couldn’t bear the thought of touching where he’d touched and contaminated her.

This brief story – which concludes, incidentally, with two of the teacher’s male colleagues being blithely sexist about her – highlights the impact acts such as the one described have on their victims. It is a mini-masterpiece that takes something rarely talked about (and certainly something that was almost completely disregarded in the year of the story’s setting), something that the protagonist feels ‘shame’ about, and turns it into a diamond sharp work of art.

Ritual, 1969 is a subtle collection of considerable breadth and ambition that sees Mazelis take us into a world which is both familiar and yet at the same time somehow uncanny. By taking the reader out of their comfort zone she makes them look again and again at the familiar, making them realise that it was never quite what it seemed in the first place.