Being Small, Chaz Brenchley, Per Aspera Press, 2014, 225 pages, ebook ISBN 978-1-941662-02-1
Michael is a twin, only his other half is dead, pulled out of his stomach at birth and consigned to a glass bottle on a shelf. The twin’s name is Small, Michael’s mother insists on including him in almost every aspect of their lives. This is not as a bad as it sounds, or almost not. Michael’s mother, is a (possibly) deranged over-controlling horror who has been home-schooling him and insists on moving house every six months for reasons of her own which definitely include keeping him under the child protection services’ radar. The social isolation which is an accidental - or maybe not - product of her behaviour has meant that Michael’s only companion - other than his mother - is the dead, but far from silent Small. This is the imaginary friend syndrome taken to an horrific extreme.
I don’t know about other readers, but to me this manipulative, controlling, selfish, unpredictable person is one of the creepiest literary mothers I have encountered in a long time. This is not a criticism. The book needs to have this maternal ogre near its centre for the key events, both funny and tragic to work. She is well up there in the pantheon of ‘Mommy Dearests.’
As so often happens, this triad begins to come unstuck with the arrival of adolescence. First Michael makes friends with Adam, a friendship that, assisted by the gift of a bicycle cannot be broken by moving house.
“It might well have been the first time I ever understood the value of a friend not cut from my own body, not forced to shape himself within the cavities of my own thought.”
Mother is not happy about this threat to her hegemony. In effectively drawn scenes of argument and bickering, we see some of the strategies she has used in the past to control Michael. Her days are numbered. At this point I wanted to give a little cheer. Perhaps because I worked so many years with young adults, I found myself caring deeply about Michael as he tries to break her hold over him. I found her use of Small as a weapon particularly odious.
Still Adam is only the beginning. Stronger threats are still to come - in the form of “…a mess of black…, all eyes and fur and tangled limbs and happy mouth and heavy.” Nigel, the dog, accompanied by Kit and Peter and an invitation to play chess with Quinn, who is dying of AIDS. Michael is about to step into a world and a company of people that will change him forever.
Michael’s first person narrative of events as well as his astute comments and opinions about people and situations gives Being Small a powerful immediacy. Using the device of a dead twin in a bottle, Chaz Brenchley has written a powerful and moving story of the struggle of a young man in an impossible home situation to become a unified and independent individual.
The second half of the book describes in painful and accurate detail the sadness and rage that came while watching dear friends lose their battle with AIDS. I write that word friends in the plural, because I am of an age to have been in New York City at the beginning of the plague, as we called it then. Chaz writes about the human experience of these events so powerfully, that even 35 years later the memories come flooding back, making it hard to write.
This is not a long book. The language is clear and simple, elegant like all of Chaz Brenchley’s work, but the impact of the writing will stay with me and I think most readers for a very long time. I whole-heartedly recommend it. 5*****