Radar: Recent Cultural Picks 12.01.26

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This week’s Radar features a range of genres from a range of time periods. The first is the short story Oysters by Anton Chekhov from 1884. There is so much to love about Chekhov’s style, despite the fact his life-view seems to be inherently a pessimistic one based on the idea that our lives are essentially lives of endurance and suffering. His attention to detail, though, is really what I think marks him out as one of the finest short story writers; or perhaps not just his attention to detail but his selection of which details to include and which ones to leave out, so as to make his stories elliptical, but in an inviting way. This is very much the case in Oysters which sees a child have to beg in the street with his father. The boy passes out from exhaustion saying the word ‘oysters’ and is then taken to a nearby restaurant where he, it seems, is fed oysters for the entertainment of the drunk, rich men who have carried him there. So hungry is he that he begins to eat the shell, much to the amusement of the men. It’s a sad story, and at the end the father is left to rue the fact that he could have asked the men for money instead of letting them give his child oysters. I’ll not say anymore for risk of explaining it away, however the image of the father at the end is quite a tragic one, and your heart goes out to his son. Chekhov is very much holding a mirror up to Russian society showing its brutal class division and social injustice in this one, though; you get the feeling he was angry when he wrote this story.

How many times have we seen short story writers compared to Chekhov? “So and so is Chekhovian in there blah blah blah...” I often wonder whether these people have ever really read Chekhov, for if they were to read him, they’d discover that his work and the themes of his work are really quite distinct and I’m also not entirely sure writers should see it as a compliment. For my money, Chekhov was brilliant, but his outlook was bleak. In Uncle Vanya, surely one of his greatest works, Sonya near the end says ‘we shall rest’ and for me this epitomises a lot of the fates of Chekhovian characters; they are ultimately passive, helpless characters with no free will, passively accepting their fate, justifying their pain and suffering through the idea of fate. Chekhov was a writer of human suffering, pain and endurance; those who seek redemption and hope from their reading should look elsewhere. 

While Wendy Erskine inherits Chekhov’s eye for detail, and her characters do show a sense of suffering, her work is too hopeful and redemptive to be called Chekhovian. I’ve been following the work of Erskine for a while, and think she’s a terrific writer. Stevie, featured on Radio 3’s The Essay recently, as part of series inspired by Schubert’s Song Cycle, was a meditative piece about a grandmother on a train, watching the world go by while reflecting on time past. It ends with her shunning a taxi ride and instead walking through town to the sound of Schubert in the background, and the lights of Christmas. However Chekhov ended such a story, I doubt it would have been so resolute and optimistic, yet there was a sense of resilience and endurance in the protagonist that was certainly, and I don’t use the term lightly, Chekhovian. 

After listening to this I then found another series of The Essay which focused on the creation of the Irish border. Knock, Knock, Who’s There? by Wendy Erskine which was an essay, this time, about thresholds, particularly the threshold of books and the imagination. It covered a lot of ground from Georges Perec to jazz to Aldous Huxley, written in a way which wore its learning lightly. It was an illuminating piece from a writer whose greatest skill seems to be in paying attention; she’s certainly a writer who has earned mine.

The Killing Season is the last thing I want to write about here as it was a crime drama I listened to over the Christmas week, and it was very good indeed. It’s set over the course of Christmas Eve through to Boxing Day and follows a number of murders that happen in a small village at that time. It was written by RD Wingfield who was the creator of the detective Jack Frost from ‘A Touch of Frost’ even though he distanced himself from the television drama made from his novels, saying ‘that’s not my Frost’. The series had originally been lost but was since returned to the BBC by The Radio Circle (a fantastic and fascinating group) and preserved, so as to be repeated this Christmas however many decades after it had been first broadcast. It’s a testament to the power of radio and the connection that it can have that a group of people would have enjoyed something so much as to record it and preserve it. And although its ending was more than a little far fetched it was still very enjoyable, and, in it, we can see the balance of wit and true crime grit that went on to form the DNA of A Touch of Frost.