- The Teeth of a Slow Machine by Andrew Roff. Wakefield Press. 216pp. $29.95.
There is an accumulating strangeness about contemporary living. Inconsistencies and absurdities seem to swirl around us. Writing about them can come off forced, as if we don't even believe our modern predicament when it is reflected back to us.
But Andrew Roff creates short-story bound worlds that feel like ours, even when he ventures into an absurder realm.
In "Bock Bock", the prize-winning story that begins this debut collection, a hardened enforcer tracks down those who dare steal the Recipe, the closely guarded trade secret of fried-chicken take-away conglomerate that tastes oh-so familiar. Dixie the enforcer, in my mind, is in the realm of film-noir P.I.s, peering through venetian blinds, cracking tough cases and not letting anything get to him - least of all the rancid reality of factory farming chickens. It's dark and delicious - a rush of flavour with the odd, synthetic aftertaste of real-world corporate misbehaviour.
The pandemic is here too. A woman writes a computer script to calculate her partner's chances of dying from COVID in "Else/If". Her quest for certainty in an uncertain world, encoded in the language of cold numbers, is human and revealing. Who wouldn't want to run the calculation?
Roff experiments with form throughout the collection. The video-game satire - "Reality Quest", in the form an old-style text-based choose-you-own-adventure - is laced with humour, punctuated in a way only the call-and-response form here could allow.
A woman blacks out and commits lavish acts of generosity in "No Good Deed". A life of serving vested interests has taken its toll - helping mining companies blow up sacred Indigenous sites - but what help is available when the problem is actually a social improvement? It's a clever premise to prompt self-reflection on the moral culpability of individuals in greedy schemes. Where might their breaking point be?
"The Mind-Body Problem" is Roff at his darkest: social experiments on asylum seekers at an offshore camp to analyse human nature. It is complete with the reasonableness of Jonathan Swift's modest proposal. The implied violence does not, however, feel gratuitous; the condemnation comes for the academic cruelty those in the country's care are subjected to. Can we really accept this?
Roff has delivered a technically accomplished collection of short stories, a form too often overlooked in contemporary writing by readers at large, especially in volumes like this. But Roff's work shows that sometimes a worthy idea needs just a handful of pages to land its punch; while they would be diluted and shapeless as longer, drawn-out works, they are not less important ideas. With loose connections between the stories, this is a universe built in pieces rather than by an extended narrative.
The short story's utility and flexibility is on display here, along with Roff's ability to mould the form to capture, and reflect, the undercurrents of our age.