George Bernard Shaw, using Colonel Pickering as his mouthpiece in the play, Pygmalion, says: “There’s always something professional about doing a thing superlatively well.”
Guess that qualifies Thom Jones posthumous collection of stories, NIGHT TRAIN, professional.
These new and selected stories are superlatively well written, muscular, sinewy, tooth and claw ferocious, and sometimes, deeply, darkly hilarious.
Probably best known for his short story, The Pugilist at Rest, Jones’ stories flex, clean and jerk, weightlifting an emotional intelligence to the deltoids of human existence and following through with an elevation of imagination with a championship snatch.
Military service and medical issues are the mainstays in these megawatt stories, complete, crystalline, clear, in character, vernacular, cadence and credence.
What’s courage and what’s cowardice runs through this jungle of feelings and observations thick with jaundice and joy. Jungle features in two story titles, Way Down Deep in the Jungle, and A Run Through the Jungle. For Jones, it is a jungle out there -”Human behaviour, ninety-eight percent of it, is an abomination.”
That leaves two percent of abomination’s antonyms to examine with the same expressive excision, which he does with the same scorching style.
In Mosquitoes, his narrator is a doctor facing ethical conundrum : by virtue of his profession and swearing the Hippocratic oath, the protagonist of mosquitoes is an avowed anti Darwinist – “I took the Hippocratic oath and vowed to patch up… violent criminals and send them back out on the streets to wreak more havoc and mayhem on themselves and on others. I try not to think of that. I like to hope for the best.”
Nevertheless, most of his characters mirror similar stances. A view of the carnival of childhood before picking up on the tawdriness of carnivals and the loss of the enchanting splendour of them.
There is plenty of tawdriness in Jones perfect, genuine, complete prose, but it also contains an enchanting splendour.
NIGHT TRAIN New & Selected Stories by Thom Jones is published by Faber