The Spit Children (Jo Randerson, 2000)

ISBN 0-86473-396-8

I first heard the name Jo Randerson when I caught the last few moments of a radio interview. The interviewer – Kim Hill I think it may have been – left off fawning all over her for just a brief moment, in the dying seconds of the show, to read this passage:

If you ask the Wheelchair Boy about gravy he has it on all meals, always, even on ice-cream, and he will tell you he has met the Lady Grief, and he will say,
Introduce yourself.
Introduce yourself and then next time she comes you will be as friends, you and the Lady Grief.
– p. 56

Leaping to the wild and quite unfounded conclusion that this passage marked the introduction of a new character into something of substance, perhaps a short story, I was impressed. But it wasn't. The Wheelchair Boy is a scrap of free verse, and what I've just quoted is the whole of it.

In fact, none of the pieces in this book is longer than a few pages, and most are very much shorter. The title story is 103 words. That's ok, I thought; it can still be good. But it's not. Here's another free verse, very much more typical than The Wheelchair Boy, called And:

although the
plants grew
for many days
they never got
any bigger but
only seemed to
be just
managing to
stay alive.
– p. 51

(Yes, the incorrect use of initial capitals and punctuation in this and the other quotes given here are faithful to the originals.)

These aren't poems or short stories or ... or anything; they're ideas, rough notes for individual passages that might, one day, be included in a 'real' story or poem. I have yet to encounter a better (published) demonstration that a writer's imagination – even a good one, such as Randerson's assuredly is – is worthless without the accompanying virtues of discipline and hard work. There is very little in here which could not have been conceived and executed in the time it takes to walk from the study to the kitchen to fix a snack. The author didn't even bother to title this one:

things break when they break
and neither you nor I are my aunt
asking
casually
do you think the weather will hold
– p. 70

Yes, with enough work and the proper context some of these ideas might fly: A few might even prove powerful, indeed, but to wrap them up in a book as they are, and fob them off to a paying public as finished work, strikes me as ... words almost fail me ... dismissive and contemptuous. Don't forget, for the same twenty bucks you'll pay for this book, you could buy, let's say, Yeats collected works. Nobody in their right mind could read The Stolen Child and consider Randerson's chicken scratchings even remotely comparable.

Some of the longer pieces are sufficiently complex to embody a message. The values promoted are the conventional dogma of the university student common room: men are dumb, selfish, power-hungry rapists; the pursuit of excellence generally, and the free market in particular, are bad; everything would be alright if only everybody shared everything and was nice to each other.

Recommendation: Trivial and slight. Buy almost anything else instead.

Look and Feel: My edition is the usual matt-finish paperback. Short. With lots of white space.

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