Here's an interesting setup for a Conversation Pieces volume.

Erik Hofstatter is Czech but he lives in the UK nowadays, where he presumably found the Rollright Stones. They're a set of three bronze age megalithic monuments on the border of Oxfordshire and Warwickshire. The King Stone is one large stone, a dolmen; the Whispering Knights is a collection of large stones; and the King's Men is a stone circle. Legends state that the stones were originally human beings, a king and his knights, who were turned to stone by a witch called Mother Shipton, a major folkloric character in her own right, who is better remembered for her prophecies.

This book references William Camden's version of the story, written in the seventeenth century. In this version, Mother Shipton stopped a king and his army at this spot and offered him a prophecy in the form of a challenge. If he takes seven long strides and sees the village of Long Compton, he will become the king of England. He took seven long strides but didn't see the village, so Mother Shipton turned them all into stones and herself, for some reason, into an elder tree. Of course, the king became the King Stone, his army the King's Men and a few late arrivals plotting against him the Whispering Knights.

I've outlined all that because this book is not a new retelling of that legend in a way we're used to legends being retold. It certainly mentions it, with a few key lines borrowed from Camden at key moments, but it's effectively a new story woven around the existing one in an attempt to explain it. In other words, it's fiction that serves as a kind of impressionistic prequel to an age old legend.

It gives names to some of the people who were turned into these stones and builds characters for them by letting us in on what they think. It does this by framing their thoughts as messages never sent but imagined in a matrix of combinations that coalesce into a story. We could consider these prose poems, given the carefully poetic use of language, but they're also glimpses, many of them so short that they're entirely done in a single line.

That makes reading this book rather akin to showing up late to a party where everybody's talking about the same thing but we don't have a clue what, given that we're inherently thrown in after. We hear catches of conversation all over the place but no grasp of any of it until this thread starts to connect to that thread and gradually we figure out what's going on. Hofstatter clearly enjoyed this approach because he keeps things deliberately unconnected for quite a while, every now and again teasing us with a connection, but throws us a lot of bones at the very end to make sure that we got it, just in case we hadn't figured it out by that point. I had, I think, but not by much.

And, given that approach, I can't actually talk much about the story because we (if my experience is in any way typical) don't know what that is until the closing stages, which would therefore count as a spoiler. I guess I can attempt to introduce the characters, as long as I don't go too far, because everything here is discovery and interpretation.

We start out with Ulla writing to Ena, if we can use that word. Of course, nobody's actually writing anything, because none of these characters have been living people for centuries, if not millennia. The stones date back to a few centuries BC but there are occasional references in these letters to fertility traditions that arose much later, in the late eighteenth century. So maybe the stones are looking back from relatively recently to events that occurred a couple of millennia ago.

Anyway, Ulla is clearly Ena's mother, so we have our first connection right there on the first page. Similarly, we quickly learn that Tyne and Morven were lovers, but Siddel wanted Tyne and maybe had him too, even though Tyne and Siddel are male but Morven female. The men are presumably members of the king's army, but Morven is somebody's chambermaid. So we have a bisexual love triangle here. Who said prose poetry is boring? And that leaves Burne, who is the king, someone who isn't merely riding through this land but who also has history with it and its people, crucially including a couple of very specific people.

So there's the grounding, in the legend and the characters. For the rest, you'll need to read this book yourself and see how quickly you figure out what's going on. I worked it all out early enough that the last few pages were confirmations rather than revelations, but "early enough" wasn't at all early. I was highly confused for a long while but persevered and gradually pieced together the clues. I think I'd got the majority of it by three quarters of the way in, with only a clever twist still to come, but that doesn't mean I had most of that much earlier. It's definitely a puzzle of a book.

The other obvious note to make is about the language. This is crude, as perhaps it should be for a story that really happened a couple of thousand years ago. It's also brutal, because each of these letters is told from a perspective of pain, usually some form of loss but also regret and anger and jealousy. However, it seems like Hofstatter often chooses to lull us into a false sense of security so we're all the more shocked when a character spits out a particular word or phrase. I'm not saying that it's inappropriate?—this entire story is built around curses, after all?—and some instances are highly effective but others seem entirely gratuitous, serving no purpose but to shock.

It's unusual, but certainly not unprecedented, for a 'Conversation Pieces' volume to be penned by a male author, given that the point is feminist science fiction. However, this absolutely recounts a feminist story, bringing a fresh, albeit fictional, perspective to an old legend. ~~ Hal C F Astell

For more titles in the Converrsation Pieces series click here