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Being Small
British Fantasy Award winner Chaz Brenchley is well known for lyrical and elegantly written stories and novels. Now he has crafted a deeply personal ghost story of dead twins and mad mothers, of Moleskine notebooks and teen friendships, of AIDS care-givers and more. Michael's shadow twin?-?Small?-?was his fetus in fetu before being removed and preserved in a specimen jar at the medical school. Michael and his single mother keep the rest of the world at bay while they hold the spirit of Small close - she homeschools Michael, moves house every six months, and at restaurants she asks for a table for three, "but there'll only be the two of us eating."
When Michael turns sixteen, he meets a household of men caring for Quin, dying of AIDS. Michael is drawn ever more deeply out of his lifelong conversation with his mother and Small and into the far more tangible world he finds at the house down the street with Quin, Kit, Gerard, and the others?... ?and discovers some unexpected things about himself in the process.
When Michael turns sixteen, he meets a household of men caring for Quin, dying of AIDS. Michael is drawn ever more deeply out of his lifelong conversation with his mother and Small and into the far more tangible world he finds at the house down the street with Quin, Kit, Gerard, and the others?... ?and discovers some unexpected things about himself in the process.
- GenresHorror
174 pages, Hardcover
First published August 28, 2014
50 people want to read
About the author
Chaz Brenchley
115 books79 followersChaz Brenchley has been making a living as a writer since he was eighteen. He is the author of nine thrillers, most recently Shelter, and two major fantasy series: The Books of Outremer, based on the world of the Crusades, and Selling Water by the River, set in an alternate Ottoman Istanbul. A winner of the British Fantasy Award, he has also published three books for children and more than 500 short stories in various genres. His time as Crimewriter-in-Residence at the St Peter's Riverside Sculpture Project in Sunderland resulted in the collection Blood Waters. He is a prizewinning ex-poet, and has been writer in residence at the University of Northumbria, as well as tutoring their MA in Creative Writing. His novel Dead of Light is currently in development with an independent film company; Shelter has been optioned by Granada TV. He was Northern Writer of the Year 2000, and lives in Newcastle upon Tyne with a quantum cat and a famous teddy bear.
Also known as author Daniel Fox.
Also known as author Daniel Fox.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
November 24, 2014
Just yesterday I read Chaz Brenchley's Being Small. It's the kind of book you want to read twice, at least, once for plot and once to see it all in the light of the plot twist/paradigm shift. It's a short book, so it will be easy to do that, but I'd do it even if the book were 800 pages long. It's that good. A classic: deft, subtle, moving.
The language is entirely suitable to the narrator, a 16-year-old boy, but is also clean prose rising to lyricism at key moments. ("Clean prose" is not faint praise; writing it takes skill and courage.)
The book is flawlessly constructed without feeling constructed at all. The convolutions of the plot arise naturally from the characters involved: Michael, the narrator; Small, his dead twin brother; their mother Alice who constantly seeks change, moving from one neighborhood of Oxford to another every six months. In the final neighborhood, Michael encounters a group of mostly or entirely gay friends who are nursing a dying professor named Quin. Michael walks their dog and plays chess with Quin and gradually becomes a trusted friend and caregiver.
One thing I love about this book is that yes, it has plenty of gay characters, but the issues at the heart of the story are not questions about being gay. Everybody who spends time at Quin's house is comfortable with their sexuality.
Please read it, because I seriously want to discuss it with someone. I'm proposing a panel on this book for FOGcon, but I'd rather not wait until March.
Every year I look for a new literary find -- an author whose work speaks to me. This year it's Chaz Brenchley. I'm delighted because he has a long backlist, so I can look forward to many more hours in his clearly imagined, beautifully invoked world.
The language is entirely suitable to the narrator, a 16-year-old boy, but is also clean prose rising to lyricism at key moments. ("Clean prose" is not faint praise; writing it takes skill and courage.)
The book is flawlessly constructed without feeling constructed at all. The convolutions of the plot arise naturally from the characters involved: Michael, the narrator; Small, his dead twin brother; their mother Alice who constantly seeks change, moving from one neighborhood of Oxford to another every six months. In the final neighborhood, Michael encounters a group of mostly or entirely gay friends who are nursing a dying professor named Quin. Michael walks their dog and plays chess with Quin and gradually becomes a trusted friend and caregiver.
One thing I love about this book is that yes, it has plenty of gay characters, but the issues at the heart of the story are not questions about being gay. Everybody who spends time at Quin's house is comfortable with their sexuality.
Please read it, because I seriously want to discuss it with someone. I'm proposing a panel on this book for FOGcon, but I'd rather not wait until March.
Every year I look for a new literary find -- an author whose work speaks to me. This year it's Chaz Brenchley. I'm delighted because he has a long backlist, so I can look forward to many more hours in his clearly imagined, beautifully invoked world.
November 1, 2014
Michael is a twin, only his other half is dead, pulled out of his stomach at birth and consigned to a glass bottle on a shelf. The twin’s name is Small, Michael’s mother insists on including him in almost every aspect of their lives. This is not as a bad as it sounds, or almost not. Michael’s mother, is a (possibly) deranged over-controlling horror who has been home-schooling him and insists on moving house every six months for reasons of her own which definitely include keeping him under the child protection services’ radar. The social isolation which is an accidental – or maybe not – product of her behaviour has meant that Michael’s only companion – other than his mother – is the dead, but far from silent Small. This is the imaginary friend syndrome taken to an horrific extreme.
I don’t know about other readers, but to me this manipulative, controlling, selfish, unpredictable person is one of the creepiest literary mothers I have encountered in a long time. This is not a criticism. The book needs to have this maternal ogre near its centre for the key events, both funny and tragic to work. She is well up there in the pantheon of ‘Mommy Dearests.’
As so often happens, this triad begins to come unstuck with the arrival of adolescence. First Michael makes friends with Adam, a friendship that, assisted by the gift of a bicycle cannot be broken by moving house.
“It might well have been the first time I ever understood the value of a friend not cut from my own body, not forced to shape himself within the cavities of my own thought.”
Mother is not happy about this threat to her hegemony. In effectively drawn scenes of argument and bickering, we see some of the strategies she has used in the past to control Michael. Her days are numbered. At this point I wanted to give a little cheer. Perhaps because I worked so many years with young adults, I found myself caring deeply about Michael as he tries to break her hold over him. I found her use of Small as a weapon particularly odious.
Still Adam is only the beginning. Stronger threats are still to come – in the form of “…a mess of black…, all eyes and fur and tangled limbs and happy mouth and heavy.” Nigel, the dog, accompanied by Kit and Peter and an invitation to play chess with Quinn, who is dying of AIDS. Michael is about to step into a world and a company of people that will change him forever.
Michael’s first person narrative of events as well as his astute comments and opinions about people and situations gives Being Small a powerful immediacy. Using the device of a dead twin in a bottle, Chaz Brenchley has written a powerful and moving story of the struggle of a young man in an impossible home situation to become a unified and independent individual.
The second half of the book describes in painful and accurate detail the sadness and rage that came while watching dear friends lose their battle with AIDS. I write that word friends in the plural, because I am of an age to have been in New York City at the beginning of the plague, as we called it then. Chaz writes about the human experience of these events so powerfully, that even 35 years later the memories come flooding back, making it hard to write.
This is not a long book. The language is clear and simple, elegant like all of Chaz Brenchley’s work, but the impact of the writing will stay with me and I think most readers for a very long time. I whole-heartedly recommend it. 5*****
I don’t know about other readers, but to me this manipulative, controlling, selfish, unpredictable person is one of the creepiest literary mothers I have encountered in a long time. This is not a criticism. The book needs to have this maternal ogre near its centre for the key events, both funny and tragic to work. She is well up there in the pantheon of ‘Mommy Dearests.’
As so often happens, this triad begins to come unstuck with the arrival of adolescence. First Michael makes friends with Adam, a friendship that, assisted by the gift of a bicycle cannot be broken by moving house.
“It might well have been the first time I ever understood the value of a friend not cut from my own body, not forced to shape himself within the cavities of my own thought.”
Mother is not happy about this threat to her hegemony. In effectively drawn scenes of argument and bickering, we see some of the strategies she has used in the past to control Michael. Her days are numbered. At this point I wanted to give a little cheer. Perhaps because I worked so many years with young adults, I found myself caring deeply about Michael as he tries to break her hold over him. I found her use of Small as a weapon particularly odious.
Still Adam is only the beginning. Stronger threats are still to come – in the form of “…a mess of black…, all eyes and fur and tangled limbs and happy mouth and heavy.” Nigel, the dog, accompanied by Kit and Peter and an invitation to play chess with Quinn, who is dying of AIDS. Michael is about to step into a world and a company of people that will change him forever.
Michael’s first person narrative of events as well as his astute comments and opinions about people and situations gives Being Small a powerful immediacy. Using the device of a dead twin in a bottle, Chaz Brenchley has written a powerful and moving story of the struggle of a young man in an impossible home situation to become a unified and independent individual.
The second half of the book describes in painful and accurate detail the sadness and rage that came while watching dear friends lose their battle with AIDS. I write that word friends in the plural, because I am of an age to have been in New York City at the beginning of the plague, as we called it then. Chaz writes about the human experience of these events so powerfully, that even 35 years later the memories come flooding back, making it hard to write.
This is not a long book. The language is clear and simple, elegant like all of Chaz Brenchley’s work, but the impact of the writing will stay with me and I think most readers for a very long time. I whole-heartedly recommend it. 5*****
December 16, 2014
Michael lives with mother and his dead brother Small.
They were twins, Michael and Small, until Michael absorbed Small into his stomach before being born. Small was removed to allow Michael to thrive, but that does not mean he has gone away.
Small is accounted for at meals, on birthdays. He is Michael's main playmate, chess opponent and extra space to store memories and knowledge. Small has been twinned throughout his personality and circumstances since Michael was born. But when Michael makes his first friend he starts to drift away from his dead twin. On his 16th birthday and with a chance meeting with a dog and its owners, Michael starts to change.
But Small cannot change. He is dead. And he is not accepting of changes with and distance from his twin.
'Being Small' is one of the most human things I have ever read. From Michael, who always wants to be bigger and cannot handle being called small and his nomadic and very specifically mad mother, to the household of adults and the ill man that is the center of their lives it is a stunning look at the struggles that fill growing up, dealing with loss, trying to survive. It is rich with humanity, all the terrible tragedy and utter joy that makes up the human experience.
Being Small is a coming of age story thick with ghosts. It is a look at identity, at learning, at human relationships, at coping. And it is beautifully written. Highly recommended.
They were twins, Michael and Small, until Michael absorbed Small into his stomach before being born. Small was removed to allow Michael to thrive, but that does not mean he has gone away.
Small is accounted for at meals, on birthdays. He is Michael's main playmate, chess opponent and extra space to store memories and knowledge. Small has been twinned throughout his personality and circumstances since Michael was born. But when Michael makes his first friend he starts to drift away from his dead twin. On his 16th birthday and with a chance meeting with a dog and its owners, Michael starts to change.
But Small cannot change. He is dead. And he is not accepting of changes with and distance from his twin.
'Being Small' is one of the most human things I have ever read. From Michael, who always wants to be bigger and cannot handle being called small and his nomadic and very specifically mad mother, to the household of adults and the ill man that is the center of their lives it is a stunning look at the struggles that fill growing up, dealing with loss, trying to survive. It is rich with humanity, all the terrible tragedy and utter joy that makes up the human experience.
Being Small is a coming of age story thick with ghosts. It is a look at identity, at learning, at human relationships, at coping. And it is beautifully written. Highly recommended.
December 30, 2014
Not my favorite of Chaz's books. Maybe I just wasn't in the mood for what Chaz was offering this time around.
I was most interested in the character of Quin, a supporting character whose slow demise is the focal point around which Michael and the rest of the support case revolve around. I found myself wanting to know more and more about Quin, his life and his relationships to his "court."
At the same time, I wasn't very interested in Michael, the books protagonist. He seemed two dimensional to me, and perhaps this is something Chaz intended. Michael is incomplete without his long-dead twin, Small. While the specter of Small haunted the story from start to finish, I just couldn't find myself able to care about him or about his relationship with Michael.
It's OK - this won't stop me from looking forward to Brenchley's next book.
I was most interested in the character of Quin, a supporting character whose slow demise is the focal point around which Michael and the rest of the support case revolve around. I found myself wanting to know more and more about Quin, his life and his relationships to his "court."
At the same time, I wasn't very interested in Michael, the books protagonist. He seemed two dimensional to me, and perhaps this is something Chaz intended. Michael is incomplete without his long-dead twin, Small. While the specter of Small haunted the story from start to finish, I just couldn't find myself able to care about him or about his relationship with Michael.
It's OK - this won't stop me from looking forward to Brenchley's next book.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews