I like Sarah Tolmie's brain. The last time I encountered its quirky musings was in her slim collection 'Disease', written for Aqueduct Press's Conversation Pieces series, which was a few years ago now. She took the unusual approach of crafting each of the chapters from the perspective of diagnosing and classifying a particular human characteristic as a disease and then fashioning a case study for each. I hadn't read a book like it before or since and I do like originality.

This book is also published by Aqueduct Press but it's not part of that series and it's presented in a larger format, just a regular trade paperback. There are a couple of stories here that dip into that idea of unusual disease but it's not a focus this time. These are musings on isolation, triggered, of course, by the lockdowns for COVID-19. When not writing, Tolmie's day job is a Professor of English at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, a profession rendered very different during the lockdowns. While she adjusted, her brain clearly ran riot and this is the result.

For a while, I didn't enjoy it much, because some of these pieces are less stories and more thought exercises that don't really go anywhere and certainly don't reach conclusions. However, the longer I read, the more the stories connected with me and I found myself having a blast with the last few. Part of that is that these pieces are of wildly different length and the longer ones that I felt more kinship with are generally left until later. The first one that I truly enjoyed is 'Honey Business', and it arrives five stories in at a greater length than the first four put together.

Even though I like 'Honey Business' and I feel much of it, I don't understand it. These early stories do ask a lot of questions but they don't provide many answers. In 'Apparatchik', the title character is content to philosophise while a goat ignores him. The back cover blurb states that he's an angel but I didn't get that. 'The Death Shortage' explores life as an incurable disease that's miraculously cured and only prompts suffering. It's fascinating but it doesn't really end.

'The Forms' revolves about an odd neuro-divergence that I found fascinating, but I thought as much about what Tolmie didn't get to as what she did. 'Zoom' is wild, with the only character a photon in an existential crisis. It's agreeably weird but hardly relatable. 'The God That Got Away' is awkward because he didn't. He's still there, everywhere and everything but somehow still alone. It is a little touching but I'm as likely to sympathise with a god as I am a photon, which is to say not an awful lot. 'Honey Business' adds structure and setting and character to the experimentation but, as much as I enjoyed it, I didn't get it.

The book came alive for me with 'The Hand of M. R. James' and stayed alive throughout the three stories after it. While that doesn't sound like a heck of a lot of hits against misses, those stories do take up seventy-three pages compared to only fifty-four for the first half dozen, which weren't all bad. And they're not just better, they're glorious.

'The Hand of M. R. James' has to do with a mediaevalist specifically dealing with COVID lockdowns. She rediscovers handwriting and learns to love audiobooks. Things do change, but she continues to enjoy the special knowledge of others, even if it's Sherlock Holmes. I liked the way that a lockdown brain shifts, with Helena starting to see lines of text hovering in the air. I tend to hear mine rather than see them and I've learned to let them shuffle around in the background without much focus from me. If I'm lucky, they find their perfect forms while I'm asleep, ready for when I wake up.

This goes deeper than just musing though. The lines of text Helena sees become recognisable as a set of quotes, each from M. R. James, who many know as a writer of Victorian ghost stories but was also a mediaeval scholar and the provost of Kings College, Cambridge. He understood academia as where he lived, not just what he wrote about. And this becomes a conversation, between a young lady who's just applied to be a full professor and a dead academic. It's fascinating and it's also the most completely formed story in this book. The ending is joyous.

If nothing else matches it, the rest do at least come close. 'The Wittgenstein Finds' could easily be seen as its companion piece, another conversation between the living and the dead, but it differs greatly in approach. This time the latter is Ludgwig Wittgenstein, the philosopher, who also taught at Cambridge and is buried there in the Ascension Parish cemetery. Apparently, "the celebrated dead of Cambridge, virtuous or infamous, continue their debates under the ground." Students are well aware of this and sometimes listen. Wittgenstein has been quiet until now, but he's started to communicate, by pushing surprising objects up through the soil. How that plays out is a weird joy.

In between are 'Pickled Boys' and the perfectly titled 'My Grandfather and the Archive of Insanity' which spoke to me as an amateur geneaologist and historian. While I'm far from trained, I hope I'm not remotely as disconnected from reality as this particular grandfather. It's a fun piece, which has the potential to be factual but, even if it isn't, remains true. Ah, the struggle! 'Pickled Boys' is just a musing, like the lesser earlier stories, but it nails its setting and also finds a more effective way to wrap up. I liked it a lot and would be the one professor in the audience at this particular Britten premiere applauding how wrong it all was.

Collections are often inconsistent, especially when they play to themes, but this one feels more so than many. Tolmie is clearly well-read, much more so than I am, and she drops a lot of references in this book that tie to history, philosophy and the classics in both literature and music, not to forget the grind of rigorous scholarly study. If that doesn't scare you off, you may get more out of shorter early stories than I did, but you should feel just as much of a connection as I did to the longer, more substantial pieces in the second half. And you'll be thinking about them for a long while too! ~~ Hal C F Astell

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