Reviews

In 'Watching', the penultimate story in Tony Bianchi's Staring Back at Me, the author recalls a trip to a museum dedicated to the life of Grace Darling. Darling was the heroic daughter of a lighthouse keeper who became famous when she saved the lives of nine men from a shipwreck. The museum is small but filled with mementos and antiquities relating to her life and memory, yet among the objects displayed are pages from her father's diary, including his description of the night of the famed shipwreck. His telling of the tale, so Bianchi tells us, is brief, factual, and contains no reference to Grace. This curious anecdote is a brief part of a longer story, but the questions it raises are pertinent to Staring Back at Me: why is there a museum to a woman not remembered in her own time? Who created this hero narrative around Darling if not the other people involved? What ties together the facts as they were recorded at the time and the fact that a museum to her now exists? Staring Back at Me is very much like Grace Darling's museum - it is a loosely curated collection of anecdotes and memories that collectively tell us about a life. Similar questions are raised, and asked indirectly by, not of, Bianchi: why do we remember certain things so vividly yet forget so much? Why do we create a narrative around our lives? What ties together our memories and the significance they later hold? Bianchi asks all of this in the form of fifteen excellent, stylistically-varied and poignant short stories detailing different points in his life. Though not marketed as such, it is in many ways the perfect autobiography. That is to say, fictionalised as some of the stories may be, the collection captures the reality of a life, with all its ambiguities, gaps and questions about causality and consequence. When we read about Bianchi playing the organ in church just a couple of stories after reading about his grandfather playing the organ in church, one wonders whether the two facts are related. Similarly, the idea of watching and being a passive bystander recurs - in different ways and for different reasons - but the significance of these links is never explicitly addressed. In telling these stories the way he does Bianchi removes the neat narrative that's often found in more traditional autobiographies. While many autobiographers are keen to compartmentalise and structure their lives, ignoring the gaps and unknowns, Bianchi seems to recognise that it's not always as clean cut as that; cause and effect are not always the easiest things to pin down. A great example of this is two stories side by side in this collection. The first is a painful-to-read description of a health scare at home in North Shields with Bianchi's father, set to the backdrop of Morecambe and Wise; the second is his arrival in Wales and the start of his love affair with the language. When Bianchi starts to learn Welsh by essentially sacrificing his English identity, is this really driven by a love of language and people, or more directly a result of a desire to leave behind the family and situations described previously? The truth is most likely somewhere in between the two and perhaps that's not even a question Bianchi could answer. All we do know about Bianchi is that his love of Wales and the Welsh language, whatever led him to it, played a significant part in his life - a life that went on to play a significant part in Welsh literature. This collection, published posthumously after his death at the age of only 65, is one of a minority of books by Bianchi published in English, with the bulk being published in Welsh. Despite being from North Shields, Bianchi made Wales his home. Whether it's classed as an autobiography or simply short fiction, Staring Back at Me is an excellent collection by a great writer. The epigraph that opens the book says it all: "There isn't a great deal of difference between fact and fiction... It's just how you choose to tell a story." (James Frey) -- Liam Nolan @ www.gwales.com