Madame Zero by Sarah Hall, book review: A stunning new collection

The haunting new collection of short stories from an author twice nominated for the Man Booker Prize

Madame Zero by Sarah Hal

“Mrs Fox”, the story that opens Madame Zero, Sarah Hall’s stunning new collection, won the prestigious BBC National Short Story Award in 2013 – the same year Hall was named one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists.

It’s an arresting, eerie tale in which a woman metamorphoses into a vixen in front of her husband’s eyes – “Something is wrong with her face. The bones have been re-carved. Her lips are thin and her nose is a dark blade. Teeth small and yellow. The lashes of her hazel eyes have thickened and her brows are drawn together, an expression he has never seen, a look that is almost craven ... She is leaning forward putting her hands down, lifting her bottom. She has stepped out of her laced boots and is walking away. Now she is running again, on all fours, lower to the earth, sleeker, fleeter. She is running and becoming smaller, running and becoming smaller, running in the light of the reddening sun, the red of her hair and her coat falling, the red of her fur and her body loosening. Running.”

This scene is a perfect example of Hall’s visceral, elemental writing, but it’s also indicative of the central theme that runs through the collection: transformation.

In “Case Study 2” a half-feral, neglected child is rescued from a mountainside commune, social services’ attempt to rehabilitate him monitored by a therapist who becomes more closely involved with her patient than is strictly professional. In Luxury Hour a new mother finds herself momentarily denying the existence of her child when she’s brought face to face with an ex-lover, the erotic trumping the maternal.

“Goodnight Nobody” is an uneasy coming-of-age story in which we meet an 11-year-old girl who’s had to grow up too quickly. Meanwhile, in “Evie” – the story with which the collection draws to a close, and a more than worthy bookend companion for “Mrs Fox” – a previously mild-mannered wife finds herself unmoored by a tumult of wild desires and extravagant appetites: “She’d become a baroque version of herself, a decadent.”

There are also depictions of a world distorted, snapshots of dystopias. A regressive government bill in “Theatre 6” sees foetal care prioritised over that of the mother’s life. Civilisation has all but collapsed in Later, His Ghost, the country under assault from squalls that have destroyed buildings and infrastructure. One of the few survivors combs the ruins looking for a complete copy of The Tempest, Prospero’s “calm seas, auspicious gales” speech offering much needed solace. Then, in One in Four the “storm” is of a different kind, a pandemic – “Tents outside the hospitals, chaos, people drowning in their own fluid” – a glimpse of a deadly plague through the eyes of a man responsible for the mass manufacture of an ineffective vaccine, now asking for forgiveness.

Twice nominated for the Booker Prize for her novels The Electric Michelangelo and How To Paint A Dead Man, Hall is as bold with her pen as her character Evie is with her newfound sensuality: there’s nothing furtive about these brilliant stories. Each one is a leap into a dark, mysterious void that ultimately reveals glittering terrors therein.

'Madame Zero' by Sarah Hall is published by Faber, £12.99