Ia Genberg’s Small Comfort is something of a smorgasbord: five stories which, we’re told are ‘interconnected’. Indeed, from the perspective of broad subject – money – they are; but in solid narrative terms the ‘overspill’ between one story and the next is limited perhaps to the first two stories. Style and format is a different beast altogether though with each of the five narratives being told in radically different ways: an interview, a monologue, as the notes from a sociological experiment, and so on.
All of which makes it remarkably difficult to pass judgement on the book as a whole. Some of the stories will resonate more than others; indeed, I suspect some readers may find one or two difficult to take. Overall the experience of reading Small Comfort may have been more rewarding from a ‘craft analysis’ perspective than from being ‘told a story’. Is that such a bad thing? Depends on your point of view I suppose…
Ian Gouge - Writer 