In a Nutshell: An eclectic ensemble of original short stories and extracts which has a little something for everyone. No story is particularly bad, but such is the mix that readers will most likely enjoy some stories better than others. Well worth a fiver though.
Published in a joint venture between Profile Books and The Hay Festival to raise funds for Oxfam, this anthology, which forms the first volume in a series of four, comes with a total of nine stories, which are sandwiched between a poem by Vikram Seth, and an afterword from Oxfam which details some aspect of the humanitarian work they are involved in, around the globe. I’ve already put up an introductory post on the Ox-Tales collection as a whole, so if you want a bit more information on this then I invite you to visit that post.
Concentrating specifically on Ox-Tales: Earth then, and the stories included in this anthology are about as eclectic as it gets (as are its authors), but one could never complain that variety wasn’t a key aspect of the collection. For those who are interested the stories and authors included in this anthology (together with an extract from my reading journal a score for each story), are as follows::
- The Jester of Astapovo – Rose Tremain (Reading journal: ‘I adored every word of its 42 pages, which I’m sure any fan of this certain Russian writer would’. Score: 5 out of 5)
- The Nettle Pit – Jonathon Coe (Reading journal: “wasn’t my kind of story”. Score: 2.5 out of 5)
- Boys in Cars – Marti Leimbach (Reading journal: “another absolute cracker..[..]..which turns out to be both tender and endearing”. Score: 3 out of 5)
- Lucky We Live Now – Kate Atkinson (Reading journal: “a bit of a bizarre and strange story, but full marks to Atkinson for her inventiveness”. Score: 3 out of 5)
- Fieldwork – Ian Rankin (Reading journal: “The story only covers a page at most. It has a start, a middle and an ending, and that’s about it really”. Score: 3 out of 5)
- The Importance of Warm Feet – Marina Lewycka (Reading journal: “an endearingly titled story which turned out to be rather endearing too”. Score: 3 out of 5)
- Long Ago Yesterday – Hanif Kureishi (Reading journal: “didn’t really engage me to any great degree”. Score: 2 out of 5)
- Telescope – Jonathan Buckley (Reading journal: “actually really good”. Score: 4 out of 5)
- The Death of Marat – Nicholas Shakespeare (Reading journal: “stunning and incredibly well engineered”. Score: 4.5 out of 5)
As a collective Ox Tales: Earth may not be the most remarkable literary collection ever to be put together, but it’s certainly not the worst either. As one may expect with an anthology that marries together such an eclectic mix of authors, it’s difficult for everyone to like every story, and I found this to be the case when reading from this collection. It’s not that any of the stories are particularly bad, it’s just a question of taste, and reader preference.
Highlights in the collection for me (as you can no doubt work out from my scoring), include Rose Tremain’s delightful fictional account of Tolstoy’s final hours at the Astapovo station - The Jester of Astapovo, and The Death of Marat by Nicholas Shakespeare, which is a really clever story that links events surrounding the assassination of Jean-Paul Marat in the eighteenth-century, to the unfolding of an event in a present-day setting. For me, these two stories alone are worth buying the collection for.
One thing I would like to have seen better implemented was the stories being more closely themed around the topic of the anthology they are included in – in this case ‘earth’. A number of stories completely fill the ‘brief’ i.e. Lucky We Live Now, The Nettle Pit and The Death of Marat, but others are tenuous at best, including my favourite, The Jester of Astapovo, which simply makes a passing, although not completely disjointed, reference to going to the woods to pick mushrooms.
I do have one other point to make. It’s small and largely insignificant but it does niggle me somewhat. It’s based around the attention that Ian Rankin has received for his contribution to this volume. His name emblazons a prime spot on the cover, and he’s being heralded as a major contributor, yet his story which is based on his most famous character Rebus, only extends to a page at best. OK, so the big names sell (which is good for Oxfam), but I feel sorry for those authors whose names have been demoted to the back cover, and they’re authors whose contribution to this collection is a lot more extensive, and dare I say it – more accomplished (and I’m mainly talking about Rose Tremain here).
All in all then Ox-Tales: Earth is definitely worth reading, not least because everything in this collection (and in the other volumes) is completely new and unpublished. There is of course the real reason by buying these books too, and that’s the opportunity to give funds to a worthy cause.
Rating: 
Ox-Tales Earth | July 2009 | £5.00 | PAPERBACK | 208 PP | ISBN: 9781846682582
About Rob
I edited the Ox-Tales series so can’t resist commenting. I’m glad you liked most of the stories in this volume but can I encourage readers to splash out £20 and buy the whole set of four (ideally from an Oxfam shop)? They are, to a reasonable degree, a snapshot of some of the best current writers from Britain and Ireland, and I can a rich return. Nobody will like every story but there are many, many treats in store: 37 stories in all, along with a marvellous cycle of poems by Vikram Seth. I’d like to add a note on the names on back and front covers, too: these were very deliberately mixed around, so some of the most prominent authors (Rose Tremain, Sebastian Faulks) are on the back covers. We feel privileged to have had contributions from all 38 writers. And finally, a word on Ian Rankin’s Rebus story: it is only 200 words – but that is its point!