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| Artwork: Vincent Chong |
"I first met Kate Farrell on Monday March 5th 1984 at a place called Petyt
Hall, hard by Chelsea
Old Church
in London. I
know this for a fact because I kept a diary, and for that matter still do. It
was the first day of rehearsals for a major national tour of Garrick and
Colman’s play, The Clandestine Marriage
in which we were both playing supporting roles to such theatrical luminaries as
Joyce Redman, Roy Kinnear and Sir Anthony Quayle. Kate Farrell, or Kate David
as she was then, was a bright young character actress with a gift for
friendship and a sharp, humorous eye for the follies of her fellow actors. I,
of course, had no idea then that I was encountering a future mistress of
macabre fiction, the Countess of the conte
cruel; but I thought I could detect in her a good sport, a “trouper” to use
the old theatrical term, and I was right. Did she herself at the time have any
intimations of her great literary destiny? I think not.
During the long tour of a play indelible friendships
are forged, and sometimes indelible enmities. With Kate, happily, it was the
former. 1984 was the year that Margaret Thatcher took on the miners and, as we
made our way round England, the head of the company Anthony Quayle, expressed
the pious hope that our tour to all four corners of the nation would help heal
the great “North-South divide” that was being much talked about at the time.
How Sir Anthony imagined that the performance of an 18th century
comedy about aristocratic misalliances could oil the troubled waters of class
hatred I do not know. Kate and I both thought that the idea was b – well, shall
we say, a little far-fetched. We shared a distrust of that mixture of
grandiosity, sharp practice and slightly glib bonhomie of which Sir Anthony was
capable. A group of us, including Kate and myself, shared digs whenever we
could. There were parties and laughter and gossip; we heard reports of Thatcher’s
war with Scargill and the miners, but it seemed a world away.
After the tour there was a West
End run at the Albery Theatre and my friendship with Kate
continued when that came to a close. Over the years we kept in touch. I began
to devote more time and effort to writing. The theatre is a fickle mistress and
life took both Kate and I in different directions. One day, perhaps, she will
tell us of her experiences with the infamous Chuckle Brothers, but at some
stage show business ceased to beckon for her as well. She too began to write
and she sent me some of her stories.
I am generally wary of commenting on other people’s
unpublished manuscripts. What if they are no good? How does one gently tell a
good friend that the writing of fiction is not for them? The stories Kate sent
me were “His Family”, “Mea Culpa” and an early version of “My Name is Mary
Sutherland.” I read them and I must admit my first reaction was one of immense
relief: they were good, really good.
No disingenuous words of faint praise were needed. I was impressed by the
extraordinary assurance of the writing. Purple passages, wearisome clichés,
vague and inconsequential digressions, indeed any sign of the amateur, all were
entirely absent from her engrossing narratives. I should have known: Kate had
always been the most professional of actresses; she was bound to be
professional in whatever she took up.
But there was something much more important even than
professional competence in her writing. She had a voice: crisp, shrewd,
unsparingly honest, and rather elegant, despite the decidedly macabre subject
matter. The people in her stories lived: they were vivid, recognisable; you
might be unfortunate enough to meet them. You heard their voices and they
seemed disturbingly familiar. The story telling was often uncommonly ingenious
and surprising, as in “Mea Culpa,” but the ingenuity was not just for show; it
always had a purpose. I advised Kate to send some of her stories to Charlie
Black, for inclusion in one of his splendid Black
Book of Horror anthologies. He accepted them without hesitation, as I was
sure he would, and the rest, as they say, is her story.
As you have probably just acquired this book what more
need I say, really, except that you are in for an exceedingly entertaining and
thought-provoking time from one of the most accomplished and original writers
of macabre fiction alive today? If by any chance, you have not yet bought it,
and are browsing through its pages, then what are you doing reading this
introduction? You just have to go to the first paragraph of any of the stories
here, and you will be hooked, but before you do, save yourself the discomfort
of reading this book while standing up and probably pressed for time in a
draughty bookshop. Buy the thing – it is exceptionally reasonably priced – put
it in your pocket, go back home, make a cup of tea (or something stronger if
you prefer) settle yourself in a favourite armchair and start reading.
You have done that? Congratulations! My job is done.
But just in case you need a little further encouragement, let me say this. What
distinguishes Kate Farrell’s work is the extraordinary accuracy and vividness
with which she sets up her situations. She has an eye for detail and an
outstanding ear for the way people think and speak. It is far from fanciful to
see this at least partly as the product of her experience as an actress. In the
theatre, a natural faculty for observing one’s fellow human beings is trained
and honed. Listen to the narrator of “Waiting”. If you don’t know someone like that
personally, you will have certainly heard her talking just behind you on a bus
at some time. The intonation, the accent, the understanding, and the lack of
it, are all so true to life. But the people Farrell evokes are not all from one
social stratum, or one nation. Here is an ancient and corrupt Irish Priest
(“The Way the Truth and the Life”), here is the wife of a notorious Argentinean
dictator (“Las Cosas Que Hacemos por el Amor”), or the two Spanish
schoolchildren in “The Efficient Use of Reason”, and they are all done with the
same conviction, the same ruthless accuracy. Farrell’s eye is not heartless,
but it is unclouded by any kind of sentimental affectation; her horrors emerge
from what we sometimes call the commonplace. Very occasionally she touches on
the supernatural, but when she does she does it superbly as in one of my
favourites among her stories “A Murder of Crows” which shows that she can do an
uncanny rural atmosphere with grim poetry as well as anyone. It is the gift of
every worthwhile writer in this genre to make us realise that just beneath the
surface of the banal and ordinary, there yawn great abysses of wonder and
terror. I don’t know quite why this realisation, in the hands of a writer like Farrell,
should be so thrilling, enjoyable even, but it is. There is not a dull page,
not a dull sentence in And Nobody Lived
Happily Ever After.
And now, I suggest you waste no further time on
studying this introduction, and embark at once on the seriously exciting
business of reading Kate Farrell.
Reggie Oliver"
