Open Up

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When the anthem begins, they rise to their feet, and his father’s voice is deep and rumbling. Gareth has sung it in school before, but this is completely different. The anthem is massive, it fills his chest and roars out of him as if everything – Wales, the world, his whole life – depends on it. At the end, his father claps and yells, C’MON WALES. And Gareth yells it too, then bellows the chant that’s whirling around the stadium: WALES! WALES! He is screaming, he is letting something go. They drive up Caerphilly Mountain, Gareth secretly studying his father’s head. One day he’ll be able to read people’s minds. He just needs to learn to focus harder.

In his first book, he was trying to write a really good story. Now he was trying to understand parts of himself he hadn’t encountered before, led more by instinct and following feelings rather than beginning with an idea.Aberkariad is a tender, tragicomic delight. It’s a freighted examination of family, love, childhood and fatherhood, a way for Morris, whose parents separated when he was very young, to reflect on how this affected him. The gravity of this is somehow removed by setting it in the underwater world of Welsh-accented seahorses, where the male of the species gets pregnant and the female makes herself scarce. A father raises six boys, naively awaiting their mother’s return, while his wayward brother tries to persuade the youths to join him in Aberkariad, where males and females meet to mate. Joy Williams’s sentences don’t behave like other writers’ sentences. They tremor, and I must confess they leave me physically shaken. They hook into the quiet, deep channels of my blood and they don’t let go. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned I have to space out my reading of her work or otherwise I can be left feeling overwhelmed. Crown, Sarah (2015-11-14). "We Don't Know What We're Doing by Thomas Morris review – small-town stories". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077 . Retrieved 2023-07-25. Thomas Morris follows up his well-received first short story collection We Don’t Know What We’re Doing – which won the Wales Book of the Year award in 2016 – with five stories that explore longing, dissociation and the inability to Open Up. Cummins, Anthony (2023-08-05). "Thomas Morris: 'A lot of people in my life seem anxious and confused. I was writing for them as much as me' ". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077 . Retrieved 2023-08-13.

Passenger” is promising, if uneven, and “Birthday Teeth” is admirably inventive, filled with pleasing details from the diabetic dog to Glynn’s mum’s tea drinking. There’s a sensibility that at times reminded me of reading work from the fin de siècle, there’s a similar focus on enervated men struggling to find a footing in a hostile, decaying world. But neither story totally worked for me, particularly Morris’s blend of the real and the surreal. The different elements seemed awkwardly sutured together, and the commentary on the character’s inner lives could feel forced and overstated. Although these, along with the earlier narratives, combine to form an interesting critique of aspects of contemporary masculinity and the stifling weight of conventional gender roles. a b "Thomas Morris: 'I was hiding. I hid my stammer. I hid that we were poor. My characters can't hide any more' ". The Irish Times . Retrieved 2023-08-13. Wales' is a simple story of a child attending his first football match with his father. It’s the shortest in the collection and is perhaps a little slight, though it has all the heart that characterises the collection. I was also slightly unsure of the last story “Birthday Teeth” as while it shares much of the underlying approach of the other stories, the tale of a young vampire getting his first fangs on his 21st birthday and his struggles with a mother obsessed with cutting off the internet, was perhaps a little too odd.

Since I was little, I have operated under the belief that there is something wrong with me. I've pictured organs rotting, devouring me from the inside."

I have a difficulty with short story collections in that the individual stories rarely stay with me. Stories often blur together and I am left enjoying the collection as a whole without individual stories making an impact. I'm happy to say that wasn't the case here, perhaps because the stories are mostly a little longer and so have time to breathe. And while the stories are distinct (covering as they do seahorses and vampiric dentistry) there are common threads that that mean they work as a collection: growing up, alienation, masculinity, the effect of poverty and difficult family relationships.

Thomas Morris’s debut story collection We Don’t Know What We’re Doing won the Wales Book of the Year Award, the Rhys Davies Trust Fiction Award and a Somerset Maugham Award. His stories have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and published and anthologised in Zoetrope, Best European Fiction 2018 and The Penguin Book of the Contemporary British Short Story. He lives in Dublin, where he is Editor-at-Large at the Stinging Fly. Heart-hurtingly acute, laugh-out-loud funny, and one of the most satisfying collections I’ve read for years.’ Ali Smith, Guardian‘Books of the Year’ ABERKARIAD This was my favourite story in the collection and I think it’s a sign of clever writing when the author can evoke sympathy and empathy for characters who are in actuality, sea horses. I read the Women’s Prize 2023 listed Pod by Laline Paul, and this is also a watery imagination (dolphins). Aberkariad is far the superior tale. All these elements come together to make Open Up a completely original, at times agonising, yet completely brilliant collection of short stories. Morris succeeds in creating moments of genuine emotional intensity for his characters, each at a crucial juncture in their own understanding of themselves, and the people and the world around them.

Aberkariad' is a coming of age tale about family and loss, told from the perspective of a sea horse. If you had explained the conceit to me I may have rolled my eyes, but it is well done and absolutely works. Morris lives in Dublin and is closely associated with the city's literary scene. He is a contributor to and editor-at-large for The Stinging Fly magazine, and edited Tramp Press's short story anthology Dubliners 100 in 2014, which won an Irish Book Award. [6] He has described himself as "I’m Welsh first; I live in Ireland second; and I grudgingly accept that I’m British". [7] He has said that his curiosity in Ireland was started by watching Ballykissangel and he was not fully aware of Ireland's literary heritage until after he started studying in Trinity. [1] [8] Wales is a lot poorer than Ireland. It has internalised a learned helplessness after years of systematic neglect by Westminster. I’ve always felt a lot freer in Dublin. I’m literally a card-carrying supporter of Welsh independence. I remember a teacher presenting the British empire as something glorious, without using the word “colonising”. Coming to Ireland, the scales fell from my eyes, how different my life and my friends’ life would be if we lived in a country that wasn’t dependent and looked after its people.”He had the thought of digging up a fresh grave, drinking a bottle of drain cleaner, and just rolling himself in. He wouldn't be no harm to anyone then, and no one would have to deal with his body."