Plankton Collector, The

Cath Barton’s debut novella won the New Welsh Writing Awards 2017, and it is a joy to see it published in full here in New Welsh Review’s New Welsh Rarebyte series, alongside Mandy Sutter’s Bush Meat and Eluned Gramich’s Woman Who Brings the Rain – three slim books that support this year’s Man Booker Prize judges’ view that long doesn’t necessarily equal good. In each case here, small is beautiful. One of the beauties of The Plankton Collector is the perfectly paced, hypnotic rhythm of the writing. The slightly formal language, the use of sometimes very short sentences or slightly unusual syntax, the repetition of quiet commands, ‘Look ...’, ‘And look ...’, But look ...’, give the book a slow, dream-like quality that immediately evokes the experience of grief. One of the ways in which we cope with the tragedies of life and make sense of them is to separate out, to tell the story as if it belonged to somebody else: ‘Look now for a moment at Mary in her bedroom, lost in her book. She hears the commotion, but as if it is very far away, as if it is something happening to another family.’ Mary’s older brother Edgar is dying. There is nothing anyone can do. The family waits in limbo until the inevitable happens, which simply moves them into another limbo: ‘ ... when something or someone comes along to throw our routine in the air we are not content with the disordered way in which the pieces come down. We crave the old routine. What we know suits us, imperfect as it is.’ But there is no going back. Mary is ten years old and withdraws by curling up with a book; twelve-year-old Bunny, the middle child, curls up in his bed. Father disappears himself by spending longer and longer hours at the office, often not coming home until after even Mother has gone to bed. The family is fractured, each of them alone in their grief, with no idea how to move forward. And now each of them is visited by the Plankton Collector, who ‘goes to those who are ready and willing to receive his help’. He appears in different guises. For Mary, he is Mr Smith, who takes her on a trip to the seaside and who has a kitten called Charlie, which was Edgar’s middle name; for Mother, Rose, he is Stephen, who shares time with her at Edgar’s grave and who has the same name as a boy she had a teenage crush on; for Bunny, he is Mr George the gardener, who helps him tidy the den he and Edgar had made in the garden; and for Father, David, he is Colin – the name of David’s young and secret love, who died in the war. And finally, for them all, he is Uncle Barnaby, who takes the children away to an island for a week, giving Mother and Father time alone together, giving them all space to heal. Have I given away too much here? I don’t think so. The beauty lies in the telling, in the way Cath Barton captures the individual and the universal, so that, just as the Plankton Collector shapeshifts his identity to suit each character, so this novella will speak differently to us all. -- Suzy Ceulan Hughes @ www.gwales.com