“Granite” by Julia Armfield is full of possible metaphors, all of them presenting themselves in different characters and events. The main character tells her story of loving a man who gradually becomes ill before turning into brittle stone, and mentions her friends, neighbor, and mother on the side.
The man she loves curiously remains unnamed, perhaps to allow the reader not to see him as one contained character but as representative of many men who have been loved. She seems to love him despite herself, but it is not a perfect love. She struggles with the loss of her solitude that she is so accustomed to, but believes he is worth it. “In the fifteen minutes after he leaves,” she confesses, “the relief of space falls flush against the greater relief of missing him.” However, there are times when she wishes him dead, and she creates multiple detailed stories in her head about his demise. She scares herself with her stories, but they are too in-depth to be brushed off as fleeting lapses of the rational mind. Knowing that the main character has been pressured to find a man to love, the way she sometimes thinks about him could be revealing that she does not truly love him the way she thinks she does.
She met him after meeting someone her friends tried and failed to set her up with, and he was great in comparison to the other man. She compares the two using “‘Round Midnight” by Thelonious Monk and “Werewolves of London” by Warren Zevon, and comments on the obvious difference between the two. Like the men, one is very slow and feels like an acquired taste, while the other is generally a song everyone likes. The narrator’s friends all like and approve of the man she falls in love with. Is it possible that he only seems so great because the narrator is comparing him to others, instead of looking at him just for who he is?
I felt that her lover’s transformation into stone left a few different possibilities for what would happen should the story continue. Although the obvious conclusion is that the lover is dead, something made me think there was another option. The narrator tells of the snow that covers the ground and the cold that takes over her man. In the end, before his stony status is revealed, there are a couple of lines that suggest better days are coming. They read, “The morning is still dark beyond the curtains, snow-dark, a crust of rime about its edges. Freeze-bite before a thaw.” I like to think that this is indicative of a “thaw” of her man from his cold stone. She has not been thinking of him the way she should be, and now she’s lost the chance to fix her thoughts. His transformation is the freeze-bite and there is hope yet.
One last interesting detail that stood out to me was that Armfield drops meat-related descriptions of the main character’s home decor throughout the story. Strangely, she calls the wallpaper “veal-colored” and the room “meat colored.” This was perhaps meant to be in contrast to her lover’s lack of flesh in the end of the story. Although I could not make much sense of it or what it meant, it added yet another layer to “Granite” as a whole.