REVIEW: Escape Routes by Naomi Ishiguro

A quirky, imaginative collection exploring freedom and flight

ESCAPE ROUTES by Naomi Ishiguro Published 6th February 2020 by Headline

A novel can often be a very interesting way of exploring a theme - such as love, freedom, grief - but the very form of the 'novel' brings with it some restrictions in the amount of different ways you can approach or discuss a subject without sacrificing the overall narrative. Many novelists do this incredibly successfully, but I've always found that short story collections can approach their subjects in a much more unique way, taking a whole range of drastically different characters, settings, plots and intrinsic messages, and uniting them with a common theme.

Nowhere is this benefit of short stories more evident than in Naomi Ishiguro's debut collection. Escape Routes sees Ishiguro find inventive and unexpected new ways to explore her themes of freedom, flight and individuality, weaving through settings as diverse as the bedroom of a newly wed couple who purchase a giant stuffed bear, a fantasy kingdom plagued by rats, a rooftop where a woman comes to terms with her grief and a closet where a space-obsessed child manages to conjure a universe. It's a hugely varied collection and without the skill of Ishiguro could have ended up as a very disconnected set of tales, but the subtle thematic links are fantastically construed and as a result this is one of the most coherent sets of short stories I've read.

There are a couple of less memorable stories, but in general each of them stands very successfully as a single entity, with several of them conjuring incredibly powerful images that linger long after reading. Particularly memorable to me are the story about a space-obsessed child who comes into contact with an aerospace engineer and is challenged to draw some rather existential concepts, creating something wondrous as a result, as well as a short story focused around a man who becomes increasingly obsessed with coffee and the fast-forwarding effect it seems to have on his life.

The latter of these two, in particular, is my highlight of the collection. Ishiguro not only juxtaposes two very different types of people - those who live in the moment and have little regard for what has passed or what is yet to come, and those who are constantly trying to plan ahead and cram as much as possible into their life, to the detriment of the experiences themselves - but also very clearly plays with the form of the story to illustrate this point. As the protagonist drinks more and more coffee to facilitate his ever-increasing psychological demands of himself, he remarks that he now finds the idea of prose far too slow and laborious, at which point the story migrates to the format of a play and back, as the caffeine wears off, before then losing all structure and descending into a stream of consciousness when the protagonist hits his worst. This type of ploy can often come across as gimmicky and unearned in writing, but here, Ishiguro handles it masterfully and it's a fantastic use of the medium.

I was surprised to see some of the stories were highly interconnected, with three actually forming something of a trilogy. I liked the setting and concept of the story arc across the three tales, but it did, by the end, start to feel more like a conventional multi-perspective novel, which felt like a slight let down after the clever use of the short story form throughout the rest of the collection, though this is a minor gripe at best.

Another theme that Ishiguro explores to a significant extent is the idea of busy urban life and the homogeneity of big cities, whether specifically named as London or kept purposefully unclear. Many of the points made - about the speed that people walk, the way that rush hour affects the whole dynamic of the city and its inhabitants, the pressures this can put on one psychologically - are all things that I've been aware of in my own experience but haven't ever seen portrayed in fiction quite so effectively.

Overall, I thought this was a very impressive collection of short stories from an incredibly promising young writer. Ishiguro has a vivid imagination and the literary powers to effectively form this into a series of highly effective stories and considerations, and I very much look forward to seeing what she turns her hand to next.

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I received an electronic review copy through Netgalley in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. Many thanks to Headline for approving my request.