ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

The Man Who Took to his Bed is a collection of short stories by Melbourne poet and author Alex Skovron (whose novella The Poet I read and reviewed a while ago).  The collection comes highly recommended, with blurbers Helen Garner and Alex Miller, no less.

The titular story reminded me of Kafka’s Metamorphosis.  No, no bugs.  But similarly, a man disengaged from the world.  He simply goes to bed, and doesn’t get up.  Like the man’s bemused wife, the reader doesn’t know why, or what eventually happens.

What is important is what happened to Lucas, and this can no longer be expressed simply.  One day Lucas took to his bed.  We may speculate that it was a headache or an upset stomach, that he was exhausted and needed to rest, or suddenly sleepy and needed to close his eyes, or we may choose to explore an entirely different set of possibilities, but all our conjectures and speculations will remain within the realm of speculation and conjecture, and Lucas in the meantime has escaped us forever. It is the only thing we can know with any certainty.  (p. 17)

It’s not the first story in the collection.  The first one, ‘Day in the Life’ sets the tone: it’s about a man who wakes up to find that there is a woman he doesn’t know sleeping beside him in his bed.  This complete stranger behaves exactly like a wife of long standing – and he, out of embarrassment and uncertainty, responds to her as if he knows who she is.  She’s there again when he comes home from work, cooking him some soup.

… I could see that I was going to have to confront her. This total stranger had slept in my bed, was coming and going freely, and behaving as if we had been together for years.  Was this some elaborately staged hoax, an intricate practical joke? Was I the victim of a reality-TV setup?  I could think of no other explanation. I didn’t believe that I had suddenly developed some weird selective amnesia; I certainly didn’t believe I was losing my mind.  (p.6)

The story that follows the metamorphosis of Lucas from ‘normal’ to being completely unavailable to others, is called ‘The Man who Tried to Erase his Shadow’, so you can see where the collection is taking the reader.  This one is more grounded in reality: it’s the ramblings of a discontented man with unacknowledged problems with his wife, but it has the same disconnected quality and the same poignant longing for some elusive thing that will make life worthwhile.

Most of the fourteen stories have been published before, in other collections or in journals.  The oldest one, ‘Gambit’ (published in 1987 in a collection called ‘Storyteller, Short Stories by Australian Writers’) is cleverly structured around a macabre game of chess, but I liked it for this:

The train stumbles, rattles along, preparing to be swallowed by the south-western pylon.  Train-trips have always been something of a treat and I decide not to disembark at Wynyard.  Adjusting my position against the hard squab, I become aware of another presence nearby; he must have jumped on at the last minute, or switched compartments. The man is occupying the window seat in the row directly to the left and across the aisle from mine, looking out eastward beyond the multi-lane carriageway with its cars and buses, past the steel mesh of the pedestrian footway, towards the dozing cranes of the Opera House site, half-lost in the early-evening gloom descending on Bennelong Point. By now the shadow of the Bridge must be creeping across the ferries’ wake, in the direction of Utzon’s bristling embryo.  (p. 84)

Sydney in transition!  Sydney before its icon was built! A teenage Sydney, if you like, like the teenage protagonist, on the cusp of a future barely glimpsed.

BTW Skovron is also an artist: I checked the book to find out about the intriguing cover art, and it’s a work called ‘The Clock’ from 1992.

Author: Alex Skovron
Title: The Man Who Took to his Bed
Publisher: Puncher and Wattmann, 2017
ISBN: 9781922186973
Review copy courtesy of Puncher and Wattmann

Available from Fishpond: The Man Who Took to His Bed