posted on 25 Feb 2018

The Adventures of Speedfall by John Fuller

John Fuller is now 81 years old and has published a substantial body of poetry, prose and criticism but, for me at least, he’s never quite matched the quality of his father, Roy who I think of as one of the most notable English poets of the 1940s. John’s poetry I’ve always found perfectly readable - serviceable but not inspired – but until now I’d never tried any of his short story output.

Published in 1985, The Adventures of Speedfall, feels distinctly like something you might have expected to have been written in the 1950s or possibly the very early 1960s. I’m not sure it’s meant to be a conscious homage to the likes of Edmund Crispin or J.I.M Stewart (writing as Michael Innes) but it certainly feels like that. But with one exception: it’s nothing like as good as either of them.

This collection of eight modest short stories is linked by the presence of Speedfall, an ‘energetic and obtuse philosophy don’ living and working in the hallowed halls of Oxford University. But as a central character I have to say that Speedfall lacks any sense of depth or personality – his role in the ‘adventures’ really needs him to have personality and charisma but in truth he never gets much above operating as a two-dimensional cipher.

Perhaps all that could be lived with if the stories themselves had any real substance but, in truth, they don’t. It’s impossible not to start each story with real anticipation because the set-up seems full of promise but rather than blossom into something intriguing, they deflate in front of your eyes. Short descriptions of the stories suggest that they should  offer an entertaining read: Wriggly Porridge, for example, has the whimsical premise of an eccentric retired academic who is breeding a particularly virulent single cell sea-slime that might either deal with the problem of world hunger or, less promisingly, turn the seas into a viscous gloop. Nice idea but it really goes nowhere.

So too with the rather irritating The Mongolian Gambit Declined which has as its central conceit a Mongolian chess team that doesn’t seem to be able to play chess. All well and good until you realise that the source of most of the ‘laughs’ is a series of clumsy jokes about foreigners not speaking English. Yawn.

Gaudy, Gaudy Gumdrops offers readers a cache of vulnerable silver, double identities and an over-indulged group of  former Oxford students but once again fails to catch alight. There’s something pedestrian and one-paced about Fuller’s writing and in most of these stories I really couldn’t have cared much less what happened.

All in all this book was something of a disappointment but it was, mercifully, reasonably short. I said I thought John Fuller’s poetry was serviceable without being exciting but, on this evidence, it’s better than his prose.

Maybe Fuller’s real talent lay more in publishing than in poetry or short story writing because his creation of the Sycamore Press in 1968 was probably one of the most important events in 20th century poetry:

Set up in 1968, John Fuller's Sycamore Press published some of the most influential and critically acclaimed writers of the past half-century. Operating from a garage, the press published established authors like W. H. Auden, Philip Larkin and Peter Porter and young poets like James Fenton and Alan Hollinghurst.

(source:  https://www.ilab.org/index.php/articles/john-fuller-and-sycamore-press-bibliographic-history)

So, it’s with a degree of regret that I have to say that you should give this collection a miss and if you want campus short stories stick with Crispin, Innes, John Wain or maybe David Lodge because there’s just not enough meat on this bone to keep you satisfied.

 

Terry Potter

February 2018