![]() No: plain mud it is, deliquescent and unhygienic. Roberts could just as easily have used the word "earth", but earth implies a Romantic trope (Emily Brontë's "In the earth, the earth, thou shalt be laid", "Cold in the earth") "soil" would have done, but soil is ecological she might have rung the changes with "humus", "clay" or a dozen synonyms. It's a way of knowing," says the narrator of the title-story. Mud is the condition of eros the source of the edible world and its eaters. Down here mired in the clay of mortal flesh, readers are faced with the gunk and dreck of life, invited to notice what is underfoot, to enter and value the chthonic kingdom and taste its indelicacies. Human beings add to the mud bath after drinking sprees that render the world a giant vomitory horses in a Victorian street emit "a steaming heap of straw-woven horseshit". In "Flâneuse", Polly goes for a walk round London wearing jewelled leather flipflops: in no time, "Little curds of mud plug the gaps between her toes." In the title story, the words "mud" or "muddy" occur nearly 30 times. Her latest collection of short stories offers not only the poetry of Roberts's exquisite sensibilities but a saturnalian experience: the theatre of action is the dirt under our feet and fingernails, the unmediated matter of life and death. ![]() I n Michèle Roberts's fictional world, sensory experience presses voluptuously upon the reader's attention. ![]()
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