God “is a Taylor Swift song” In New Anthology From Chris Vobe

My guest blogger today is Martin Lyon, who reviews Chris Vobe's forthcoming new book, The Ten People You Meet.

Martin was born in Dumfries and grew up in Manchester. His grandfather bought and ran a second-hand book shop, which he maintains accounts for his cultural awakening and his love of books.

He now lives with his wife and their pet labrador Ronnie in Cheshire, where he works part-time. Martin uses his spare hours to indulge in his childhood passion for reading and always enjoys discussing and evaluating books of any kind.

THE TEN PEOPLE YOU MEET

Preview, by Martin Lyon

God “is a Taylor Swift song” in new anthology from Chris Vobe
 
For such a broad-sweeping assortment of writings, there is something unpredictably intimate about The Ten People You Meet – the forthcoming anthology from author Chris Vobe, which resists many of literature’s traditional conventions and seeks to redefine the nature of a short story collection.
 
There's a little of everything here: prose, poetry, even examples of the author's own photography are scattered throughout the pages. It’s an impressive volume of work, although one that defies easy classification.
 
If the tone seems sombre, don't be surprised. This is a deeply-reflective ensemble, one which serves both as a love letter to his home town (Warrington is the soap-factory-infused North West conurbation made famous by Eileen Bilton) and a wider reflection on the nature of life, love and our relationship with God.
 
The Ten People You Meet may not be the natural successor to The Water Tower (Vobe's extraordinarily ambitious five-volume debut), but it is probably the one we deserve. Tower was an attempt to craft “Middlemarch for the modern era”. Ten People is markedly different.
 
Divided broadly into three sections, the opening selection of freeform poems casually blend the sublime with the ridiculous. A heart-warming stroll through a string of Warrington locations (accompanied by the narrator’s “Other Mother”) shifts quickly into a surreal musing on the possibility of the ghosts of the dearly departed holding an after-hours party in a deserted graveyard (snacking on “phantom cakes / That Grandma made / From her best recipe” while “last century’s heartthrob” croons into “a haunted microphone”). It's nuts, but in an irresistible kind of way.

Chris Vobe (pictured) was intent on paying tribute to “the town that raised him”, but he doesn't shy away from spotlighting the North West's darker underbelly.

Tipping out time is portrayed with vivid depictions of the town's nooks and crannies, where “smears of ketchup” have been finger-painted on the bus station doors, the homeless “sleep in alcoves” beneath the railway bridge, and (a jolt to any complacent readers who might still be lingering) a trio of uninhibited revellers engage in a threesome at the side of the road.

The book's centrepiece – The Gospel – shifts the tone firmly towards the spiritual with an interconnected cycle of lyrics that bring forth Vobe's talent for the uplifting. 

The Gospel forms a suite of songs, each one gradually more profound and pronounced than its predecessor. “A river winds / Around the neck of time / The reeds and the memories / The fables and rhymes” he opines in the opening piece, before deftly diverting into this cleverly constructed analogy by the time of the book's sixth segment, “Conversations with God”:
 
              God is the rise of social media
              God is a hashtag, a filter, a meme
              God is a swipe – to the left, to the right
              God is the global live stream
 
From the opening line – “I've been thinking about my first devotion” – stories of love and faith are magnificently intertwined. It's here that the author really hits his stride. “Aged nineteen” he “pledged his love” – to whom we never find out, yet he deploys the topic almost conversationally, as if the reader is being granted a one-to-one audience with his innermost thoughts. This is, then, his most personal, and perhaps his purest, work.
 
“Wrap your arms around a memory” he invites us in “Charlotte's Song”, a hauntingly beautiful ode to lost love. Vobe rolls out the verbal red carpet here, depicting his recollection of the song’s titular figure as “the ghost of my best religion”.
 
“Hear me now, one last exchange / My final supplication” feels like an entreaty to closure. As if this, his second published work, might somehow be his last. But the gloomy, pessimistic tone of the outset is quickly supplanted by something much more enlightened. “I'm reaching for sunlight / Not the final Amen” he concludes, in a piece headlined “The Last Testament”.
 
The final chapter is a bittersweet love song to the woman who he asserts, in one of his rare smatterings of insight, was there at “the gates of my beginning”. The final verses are nothing short of achingly soul-bearing:
 
I love you when the darkness drapes
I love you when the light is still
The first and last truth of my life
Is that I always will
 
The book’s prose entries are just as captivating. Vobe re-activates some recurrent themes that longer-term readers are sure to find familiar, articulating a sense of desperation and loneliness through torn-apart romances that never fail to retain their human core. “We’re all flawed” comes his message, loud and clear. “True Love” and “The Woman” (one of the ten figures the reader is invited to meet) offer more than a tinge of melancholy in places, whilst simultaneously posing questions about how we live with – and without – others.
 
“The Wolf” is about as dark and disturbing as Vobe's writing is ever likely to get. It reads like something from the pen of Iain Banks. You have to really experience it to understand just how brutal it is.
 
“The Christmas Bauble”, by contrast, offers a heart-warming slice of nostalgia. The story of two friends whose lives become inextricably intertwined throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, will (at least for any readers from Generation X) unleash a flood of childhood memories. There are pop culture references aplenty, cushioned between political throwbacks in the form of the firemen's strikes and countrywide marches against the Iraq War. There's even (rather brilliantly) a tongue-in-cheek nod to the EastEnders actor Steve McFadden. The story flips effortlessly between moments of potent humour and gut-roiling sadness, but it's the denouement to this tale of lasting loyalty that's destined to bring a tear to the eye.
 
Around the edges, Vobe can't help but rattle his sabre in the direction of his pet hates – baked beans, estate agents, a Labour Party led by anyone other than Tony Blair, and the entire City of Chester – but he manages to get away with this fleeting ribaldry in a way that doesn't detract. Just as in Tower, his female characters are his strongest, feeling fleshed out and fully realised in a way that consigns some of their male counterparts to the shade. They anchor most of the prose here, with the exception of Adam Chapman – the journalist-turned-author, who we revisit for the first time since Vobe's Hampshire-based debut.
 
Now in their mid-30s, Adam and his best friend Clarissa Clements (who, at this juncture, has embraced her academic credentials and is working out of Queens College, Cambridge) find themselves navigating two difficult (and largely unrelated) conversations. Revisiting these characters feels like slipping on a comfortable pair of shoes. The collection's best entry, then, is saved for last. Adam and Clarissa are in fine form and, whilst the plot of this little detour is by no means the heaviest, it serves is a deft and skilful introduction to Little Bassington's new status quo, filling in some of the “missing years” (The Water Tower's final chapter jumped forward several decades) and teasing us with a new cast of supporting characters, at least one of whom is set to have a profound impact on the inseparable duo's life. Whether Adam and Clarissa will ever get together is a question best saved for another day, but “Fishing” nonetheless manages to offer up some tantalising hints about what's to come. An irrepressible six-year-old and a Cambridge lecturer (who, for the eagle-eyed, was namechecked at the end of Tower) come loaded with the possibility of greater significance in future books. A sequel is already in the works and a return to Little Bassington can't come soon enough.
 
“Love is a mystery / Let its magic unfold / And life is a long goodbye / Let your heart be consoled,” is how The Gospel ends. As simple as that. This, at last, is an author who has found himself. One who has evolved beyond the shock cliff-hangers and powerhouse moments of The Water Tower into a richer style of writing, the tone of which will undoubtedly reverberate for a long time to come. Blending the sentimental, the touching and the endlessly endearing, Chris Vobe cements his place as the master storyteller. After Ten People, he deserves every accolade coming his way. He's climbed the fabled mountain to reach the peak of his literary talent. Sit up. Take notice. This is sublime. It's extraordinary.

"The Ten People You Meet" by Chris Vobe will be released this winter.

Editor's note:   

Chris Vobe's superb Water Tower series is  available from Amazon:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/stores/Chris-Vobe/author/B0CD91HVN1

Connect with Chris Vobe:  
Twitter / X:  https://x.com/ChrisVobe1
Facebook author page:  https://www.facebook.com/ChrisVobeAuthor