‘All that she is and is not’

Break My Heart, Liverpool
by Pamela McGarry

Gibsons Landing: Great Hall Press, 2025
$19.95 / 9781777513412

Reviewed by Brett Josef Grubisic

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Word is, in the publishing biz, steer clear of acquiring a short story collection. 

A volume of stories: it’s impossible, it won’t sell, it’s hard to market, and the buying public almost always prefers the more immersive experience of a novel.

Though that’s the industry’s conventional wisdom for short story collections, I’ve never heard a peep about the saleability of another genre, the novella. 

Online sources, though, tell me that the general fiction acquisition process for publishers remains focused on novels, which means a knowledgeable author might choose a genre for their book cognizant of what does or does not get picked up by publishers. In other words, authors opt to produce a novel (or, conversely, avoid a novella) because they’re aware of what publisher manuscript acquisition favours and wager on a novel being a better bet. Wary authors and indifferent publishers might explain the relative scarcity of the genre.

Despite unambiguous opinion from esteemed author Ian McEwan—“I believe the novella is the perfect form of prose fiction. It is the beautiful daughter of a rambling, bloated, ill-shaven giant (but a giant who’s a genius on his best days)”—and an anecdote from him as well (“When a character in my recent book, ‘Sweet Tooth,’ publishes his short first work of fiction, he finds some critics are suggesting that he has done something unmanly or dishonest. His experience reflects my own. A novella? Perhaps you don’t have the necessary creative juice. Isn’t the print rather large, aren’t the lines too widely spaced? Perhaps you’re trying to pass off inadequate goods and fool a trusting public”), the disinclination for the novella remains the status quo.

Reading Pamela McGarry’s novella, Break My Heart, Liverpool, I was aware of my own ____ (tepidity for? suspicion of? bias against? coolness toward?) the genre. Not that I think of it as inadequate goods or “unmanly” (whatever that might mean). Offhand, it’s just a prejudice—of mine, I mean—that I haven’t spent much time examining, and, more or less, it views the novella as a story that’s gotten out of hand or an idea for a novel that needed further development. 

There, I’ve said it. As public admissions go, I realize that’s hardly scandalous. Happy to share, though.

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Well under 20,000 words, Break My Heart, Liverpool nevertheless relates entire decades across twenty chapters. The slim book’s opening paragraph telegraphs plenty: physical attraction, a romance, a marriage, and a funeral. 

Set in rebounding Liverpool after the Second World War, the novella’s elegiac tone brings to mind “The Dead” (the last piece of James Joyce’s 1914 collection Dubliners; Joyce’s story is longer than McGarry’s novella by a few hundred words, which brings up the vexing problem of definitions: where does “story” end and “novella” begin?) and the interiority of characters in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. On that opening page McGarry also showcases polished, commanding writing that conjures vivid scenes with an economical aplomb. 

Cynthia Walsh, McGarry’s protagonist—who “resembles bold bewilderment” and whose “silky-smooth lips are anchovy thin”—catches sight of Owen Black, who is Welsh, on the day of his mother’s funeral. 

While Owen’s mother was employed at Bradley’s Best (a sausage factory, where she also died), Owen is an up-and-comer at Sullivan’s Finest, a grocery that sells the funeral biscuits noted by the narrator: “Nobody touches the funeral biscuits. They remain in their basket under a white serviette until the friends of the departed will take one home with them to nibble in their own front parlours while contemplating death.”

The term “proper boundaries” appears shortly before that description, and it’s indicative of McGarry’s sense of the postwar era, where manners, propriety, and rules (of the spoken and unspoken varieties) appear to have an absolutist’s reign. In her novella, McGarry is attuned to nuance; she’s drawn to charting the atmospheric changes of a given room and pondering the myriad forces that affect and direct a person’s consciousness. The intricacies of a clockwork plotting, then, have little place in her book. 

Arguably, like the beguiling film based on Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day (or like Living, with its screenplay by Ishiguro), Break My Heart, Liverpool dramatizes a particular kind of ‘stiff upper lip’ Englishness where propriety (and an entrenched class system with it) promotes social cohesion at the price of individual freedom.

The young pair’s subsequent courtship—“of sorts. Short, not rushed, and made up of unspoken messages that grow in the dark like mushrooms”—is nurtured by Cynthia’s tremendous (if largely unspoken) physical attraction to Owen. She notes his “rook-black” hair and senses an electricity about him. McGarry handles the romance with a subtlety that suggests a keen, unresolvable tension between proper manners and deep-seated lust. For instance, at the shop when Owen sells Cynthia a half-pound of butter, she practically swoons: 

Cynthia watches his long eager fingers as he deftly wraps the butter in grease-proof paper. With the faintest groan she whirls away to places far beyond the high street and the wrought-ironed parks of her Liverpool neighbourhood, all the while grasping the edge of the counter until she spirals back just in time for Owen to slide the pack of butter across across the marble counter, him leaning on one side, Cynthia tilting on the other.

Later, Cynthia—through her mother’s eyes: “A grown woman with three children and as much clue as a sparrow”—minds her and Owen’s children as her husband moves up into the middle-class world. 

She fills the “hollow hours” with errands; she converses with girlfriends about activities (“I took the boys to the park on Tuesday”), plans (“I’m thinking of getting a perm”), and housecleaning (“I mixed Vim with Persil. You should see my kitchen walls. Spotless”). It’s all mundane, which is to say banal. “I never thought about the future,” Cynthia confides to her mother, “but now it’s arrived.”

Then, “one fine day,” Cynthia passes by an art gallery with an exhibition of paintings by Modigliani. Readers will recognize the moment as pivotal. An awakening, but of what? And, also, considering the overall buttoned-up mentality McGarry portrays, how viable? 

Of Cynthia, on the steps of the Walker Art Gallery, the narrator observes: “It seems she has dropped a stitch in the garment that is her every day, and she looks through the hole it makes. What she sees looks indifferently back at her, not minding her in the least. It makes walking into the place as easy as pie.” 

Enraptured, inspired, Cynthia imagines an exotic and foreign “world of glamour.” Can she reach it and is she entitled to the opportunity? Francis Bacon might have been painting eerily striking self-portraits in London in the 1950s, but what actual chance was there then for a housewife in Liverpool? The answer Sunshine Coast author McGarry (The Unsuitable Bride) provides may not be entirely gratifying for the reader rooting for Cynthia. It might be realistic, however. 

Elsewhere, “the custom of the day” and circumstances (in particular, unexpected deaths) quietly work a dark magic that appears to nullify or sedate Cynthia’s quest to find herself. As “she sits quietly considering her responsibilities as a mother of many children and the wife of one husband,” Cynthia (as written by McGarry) speaks to us about ourselves and others—what is, what could be, and what—given our personalities, education, gender, class position, and so on—actually can be. 

McGarry’s portrait of a woman and her era (that’s ultimately closer to story than novel, in my view) is rendered in delicate inky strokes and a lovely washed-out pastel. Break My Heart, Liverpool might not make me a convert to the novella genre, but it did make me eager to read more of Pamela McGarry’s writing.

Brett Josef Grubisic assigns, edits, and posts fiction, poetry, and children’s lit reviews for BCR; occasionally, he contributes reviews as well. [He’s written about recent books by Erin Faith Hicks, Hetxw’ms Gyetxw, Nathan Fairbairn, Otoniya Bitek, Martin Butler, Hannah Beach and Maggie Hutchings, Zsuzsi Gartner (ed.), Jennifer Cooper, Caroline Adderson, Sunny Dhillon, Wanda John-Kehewin, Ryan O’Dowd, Michael V. Smith, David Bouchard, Alice Turski, Louise Sidley, K.J. Denny (ed.), Sonali Zohra, Carrie Anne Vanderhoop, Kristen Pendreigh, Sam Wiebe, Maureen Young, Daniel Anctil, and Adam Welch for BCR.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors: Trevor Marc Hughes (nonfiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an online book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

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