What happens to us when we enter a story?
 Where do we go?
 How is time stopped?

A long short story about reading a novella… can that work? Well, yes, it can, because stories are all about the way you tell ‘em, and this one, mirroring the techniques of its model, offers a series of nested narrations and interlinked mysteries that echo the “Chinese boxes” to which the original author compared his tale.

A young man-about-town in 1894 – an unidentified “you”, for the tale is told in the second person and the reader encouraged to identify with him – is leafing through the newspaper in a café (“The Empire seems in good shape – Matabeleland has just been occupied”). His eye falls on a review of a book just published:

“The book is an incoherent nightmare of sex and the supposed horrible mysteries behind it, such as might conceivably possess a man given to a morbid brooding over these matters, but which would soon lead to insanity if unrestrained.”

Naturally attracted, our protagonist rushes off to buy the book: Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan. He is not disappointed; reading in front of the fire he is soon hypnotised first by Machen’s place-description, creating the countryside of the Welsh Border, then by the strange tale of the girl who sees Pan. Pausing to stoke the fire, he begins to muse:

“Of course, Pan is everywhere and, as yet unbeknownst to you, will be extremely fashionable for the next twenty years or so. He is stalking the cities and woods and libraries of Britain, half-man, half-goat, a hybrid being, lord of animals, bringer of madness. He has perhaps come back out of curiosity, because surely there is nowhere further from his sylvan glades than the dark streets of Pimlico and Soho?

And yet his devotees move among the throngs of London.

Fauns, naiads, dryads, centaurs. The architecture of the city is rich with carvings, gargoyles, herms. All these huge new self-important buildings, these offices, museums, department stores are infiltrated by their mocking or spying faces. How often have you glanced up and seen against the sky some secret sphinx or solemn caryatid?”

The young man reads to the end of the book, “tea going cold, the butter congealing, the fire forgotten”. He knows that if he discusses it with his friends later, he will dismiss it as “overheated. Sensational. […] hardly literature”. Fisher is an admirer of Machen and in the paragraph that follows, her own authorial stance comes over very clearly:

“Such books as this are not in the world of literary awards and prizes, of fine criticism, of high-souled and earnest discussion […] Such books and those who write them are not lofty or enlightening, they do not raise the soul.

In fact they take you down. Down into the deepest layers of the psyche, into dread, into fear, into the things that are so terrible they can only be hinted at.

Into Pan’s world of mischief and joy and panic.

Is that not also part of the human experience?”

Our young man later runs into Machen himself in a pub, not entirely by accident, and so do we in the sense that his preface to the 1916 edition of The Great God Pan is appended to this story. Machen is very interesting on how the landscape in which he grew up inspired the novella, and indeed on his ways of working in general: “I had acquired that ill habit of writing, that queer itch which so works that the patient if he be neither writing nor thinking of something to be written is bored and dull and unhappy. So I wrote”.

The publisher Three Impostors Press is a Newport firm specialising in “producing high quality, scholarly versions of interesting, rare and out-of-print books, along with other related new writing”, and as their name implies, their first projects were all connected with Arthur Machen. The series London Adventures, of which this is one, are individual short stories having some connection with London and produced in limited numbered editions of 250 for £10 each, which doesn’t seem a lot in the circumstances.  There are three so far. If you’d like to lay hands on The Yellow Nineties , Iain Sinclair's House of Flies or Xiaolu Gu’s Alice of London Fields, I recommend no delay. I can testify that The Yellow Nineties fulfilled its intended purpose in that, having previously had no special desire to read Machen, I went off to Gutenberg’s handy online resource and read The Great God Pan.

“Then it happened. The rain shadows hit the shore. Manu jumped from the rocks onto the beach and started to run. He ran in a straight line across the strand. The locusts burst up all around him in a frantic clicking and buzzing cloud, rippling rich colour back into the sky. The thin rain was falling now and the swarm started to glisten into millions of tiny reflections of light. Rising up from the running shadow on the shore, the shimmering red wave pushed up from the beach to the ridge, advancing fast, and before Alan could take a breath, his body was blasted with the buzzing thudding insects. The noise was so loud now, like radio interference, and Alan couldn’t tell if the glittering locusts were moving up or down, like confetti on a victory parade. He tried to see the beach, to see Manu, but it was all out of focus, so he submitted. He closed his eyes and lifted his chin and listened to the thousands of tiny attacks on his body and his skin, concentrated on each little thud, felt carefully each time he was hit and felt on his face the soft shroud of rain that would soon cover everything.”

This (from “Invasion”) is a beautiful, sharp piece of writing, that’s the first thing to say about it. The second is that, like many a short story, it left me both intrigued and puzzled as to what exactly it was getting at. What happens is clear enough: three men, one severely disabled, on an unidentified island get caught up in a swarm of locusts which at first they treat as a noteworthy spectacle but which by the end looks as if it might be more dangerous. It is all very powerfully and memorably described, in fact for me it is the collection’s most memorable piece, but what it’s actually about is harder to pin down, though I do think that in the last sentence quoted above, the echoes from the end of Joyce’s “The Dead” cannot be accidental or without significance, especially in an Irish writer.

The fact that the island is never identified is fairly typical. There are stories which are precisely located, like “Bullets”, but most are deliberately left vague –  eg “Poison”, which looked as if it might be somewhere in South America but in fact, according to the blurb, is Eastern Europe. In “What You Came Here For” we were in a big city where it was very hot and the streets were “canyons of concrete”, but there was nothing to locate it more closely and the name of the country, delayed some time, came as a surprise – I shan’t mention it because I think the point may have been to show how closely one set of concrete canyons resembles another. He also uses this technique of delayed information in the title story, where the gender of the protagonist is left uncertain for some time. When it is revealed, we see parallels with a real person, but the story is not about that person and we are not meant to identify the real person and the protagonist too closely, which I think is part of the point of delaying the information.

Identity and what constitutes it is a recurring theme. In “Born in a Fire”, a girl and her mother are both disfigured in different ways by an horrific accident they get caught up in while the mother is actually giving birth. The girl embraces her marred appearance as part of her identity, perhaps even the defining part – “I was born in fire” – and resists attempts to change it. The mother seems to find her own disfigurement irrelevant to who she is, until near the end when it becomes apparent that she has effectively submerged her own identity in that of her daughter. The first-person narrator of “Bullets” and the young friends he grows up with are forging identities for themselves and, sometimes, mistaking those of the people they see around them.

In “Cut” we have a narrative told through the notes of a film producer:

“Tight close on Simon, yes, working a treat. Drop the V/O? Find out in post, I guess. Tomorrow use jib shot for 17. Forecast is poor, overcast, occasional rain all day.
Winter is here.”

In this story the fictional portrayal of reality gradually seems to become more important to some of the characters than the reality itself. Though technically interesting, it takes careful reading, because the technique doesn’t lend itself to establishing character and it’s hard to get involved with them at first, which I suspect is why the notes become longer as it progresses.

His story titles are often subtle and illuminating – in “Cut” this is just what the director and his actor find impossible to do, while “Poison” goes deeper than its superficial appearance in the story (in connection with a snakebite) to the resentment festering at the heart of a relationship. “What You Came Here For” is another such. I always think this is a good sign, indicating that the author is clear in his own mind where he is going with the story and what matters in it. The only thing I wasn’t entirely happy with (if one discounts the odd typo) was the ending of “Silk”, which depends for its effect on something we know but which the protagonist does not. I felt this information had maybe been dropped into the story somewhat late and could have been better seeded.

Colum Sanson-Regan is a new voice to me and an interesting one. He has a wide range of subject-matter, theme and technique; he knows how to hook a reader into a story and his style is always striking, not least for its observational humour:

“The owl is tall, taller than the car. Tall and white. There’s a powder grey at the shoulders and the wings, and grey where the thin legs start, which bestow the odd look of a butler with orange amber eyes”.

The six short stories in this collection range in time from the 1940s to the present and beyond, and are arranged in chronological order. I even thought, when I first read through, that I could detect gradual language change in them, but it isn't that, it is rather a very keen and natural eye for period detail, so that one really feels one is in the postwar Valleys world with its Woodbines. cockroaches and the novelty of babies being born in hospital ("Progress"), or, later, in "The Cavalry", the same milieu in the changing times of the sixties, with TV and consumer goods just beginning to infiltrate a world where men could still recall war service and council estates were aspirational places to live:

They came to the end of the council houses and to the start of the terrace. The last estate house had the gable end of the terrace instead of one of its front garden walls. She'd known it before the estate was built but it was hard to remember. The terrace of Stanley Street used to point up the hill to nothing but some old mountain and a coal tip, some old farm. Yet it wasn't all that long ago. […]

It was still unchristmassy here. Mark looked at the front room windows as they passed. It must be funny to have no front garden.

Mark, a small boy, is one of the two point-of-view characters in this story (if any wiseacre ever tells you two POVs won't work in the same story, point him at this one) and as he has done before, Meredith proves adept at seeing through a child's eyes in a completely matter-of-fact and uncontrived way:

Christmas didn' happen outside the house, like you thought it would. It was grey and grainy and unmoving and nobody was about. it was like the day went on being itself, as if it didn' care what it was supposed to be like.

It may seem odd, when looking for a theme in a collection of stories, to start in the middle, but in this case it feels appropriate. It seems to me that the preoccupation common to all of them is human contact, and this comes over most clearly in the two middle stories. In "The Cavalry", a woman who works as a home help goes out of her way, on Christmas morning, to make contact with a lonely old man, and teaches her children to do the same. Later she is dissatisfied with her efforts and feels she should have done more, resolving to go and see him again very soon – "she'd heard of Home Helps finding people. She didn't want to leave it too long".

In the next story, "The Enthusiast", set in the present, a man is accidentally reconnected via email with a childhood friend, Paul, whom he has not seen or thought about for many years. This sets off a train of memories connected with his childhood and young adulthood. The email correspondence continues but they live far enough apart for the protagonist not to think about actually arranging a meeting – though the way he over-analyses the content of Paul's emails and his own replies suggests he would like to. Then something happens which not only renders this impossible but also forces him to comprehensively re-interpret the emails he has been reading.

It would be easy, but inaccurate, to conclude from the juxtaposition of these two stories that the reason communication partly succeeds in one and fails in the other is the difference between face to face contact and email. But this is misleading. The first story, "Averted Vision", takes place during World War 2; there is plenty of face to face contact and a catastrophic failure of human communication. In the second, "Progress", set in 1950, a man in what sounds like a happy marriage is nevertheless unable to communicate to his wife his understandable reasons for taking an important decision and resorts to a lie. And in "Haptivox", set in the future, a couple seems to achieve quite an enjoyable form of communication via virtual reality. Even here, though, the couple's dream of complete union is shown to be ultimately impossible:

It seemed to her that they were like two huge buildings, or cities, with their complications of floors and passageways, stairwells and liftshafts, the lacework of girders and fills of brick and concrete and then the surges of electricity and of fluids, the traffic and commerce of every day. Imagine all that thinning and becoming porous, and then these two universes interpenetrating, the stairwells from different buildings intertwining and joining, the skeletal architectures permeating one another and interlocking. The mechanical inhabitings of sex, the crude transformations on the beach were nothing to this, where the different-same energies whispered in the different-same channels. And he felt this too. All the space that matter is made of suddenly understood itself, and was generous, and let the other in. Their different grammars and lexicons didn't just blend into a creole. They atomized as they crossed and reconfigured. And once this had happened there could be no images, nothing to observe, only this new building, with nothing outside its own self-awareness and an apprehension of the marvellous.

And immediately some part of this new place started to fail. Images started to return of lights going out and pipework cooling, a sense of some shrivelled, hard thing disconnecting itself back into being.

Individuality reasserts itself; it may be that we are all ultimately "unreachable" like the old man in "The Cavalry" or "the imperfect likeness of a quick, intelligent face, glimpsed, so to speak across a gulf" ("The Enthusiast"). But the human impulse is to attempt to bridge that gulf and it is such attempts that these stories chronicle.

It isn't often you look at a writer and think how well he would have done in some more practical line of business - mostly, the poorhouse would have beckoned - but the more I read Saki, the more I realise he should have gone into the advertising/promotions industry, if only he'd outlived the trenches of the Great War (it's good that we have his last words; sad that they should have been "Put that bloody cigarette out!"). Despite (or perhaps because of) his general contempt for ordinary folk, on the evidence of stories like The Secret Sin of Septimus Brope, Cousin Teresa and Filboid Studge: The Story of a Mouse That Helped, he had a very fair idea of how to sell a product or start a trend. Look at how, in "Filboid Studge", Mark Spayley manages to sell the ailing breakfast cereal Pipenta by rebranding it as something truly revolting (the new name says it all) that one eats not as a pleasure but as a duty, "for one's health". Basically, it's All-Bran.

"Once the womenfolk discovered that it was thoroughly unpalatable, their zeal in forcing it on their households knew no bounds. “You haven’t eaten your Filboid Studge!” would be screamed at the appetiteless clerk as he hurried weariedly from the breakfast-table, and his evening meal would be prefaced by a warmed-up mess which would be explained as “your Filboid Studge that you didn’t eat this morning.” Those strange fanatics who ostentatiously mortify themselves, inwardly and outwardly, with health biscuits and health garments, battened aggressively on the new food.

Clovis operates a similar reverse psychology when helping out his pal Septimus, who writes pop songs for a living but is having trouble thinking of anything new (or finding a decent set of rhymes for "Florrie"). Clovis's solution is inspired:

“How you bore me, Florrie,
With those eyes of vacant blue;
You’ll be very sorry, Florrie,
If I marry you.
Though I’m easygoin’, Florrie,
This I swear is true,
I’ll throw you down a quarry, Florrie,
If I marry you.”

Who can seriously doubt that this refreshing burst of honesty would, as Saki asserts with magnificent dismissiveness, have taken off "in Blackpool and other places where they sing"?

For Saki's other virtue in this field would have been never to overestimate his audience's intellect. The ditty that sweeps London in "Cousin Teresa" is the last word in pointless vacuity, but one can't deny the rhythm's catchy in the extreme. When its author Lucas finds himself in the honours list instead of his much worthier older brother who has been administering some far-flung bit of the Empire, we are meant to feel slightly shocked, but in fact, as the Minister observes, this is what the honours system was about then, as it is now: "It would be rather a popular move". Fay Weldon and Salman Rushdie both worked in advertising for a time, but I think Saki would have made a fortune at it; he had both the necessary verbal flair and imagination and the even more necessary complete cynicism.

Shame, in so many ways, about "that bloody cigarette".

I got this book for Christmas. I'd read a post about the author on FB and thought she sounded like my kind of short story writer (and I'm fussy; an awful lot of lauded C20 writers in that form do nothing for me, probably because I keep thinking "well s/he's all right but s/he isn't Chekhov"). Ismat Chughtai (b.1915) was from northern India, a member of the Progressive Writers Movement and her writing, which centres on family life generally seen from a female perspective, is observational, lyrical, angry, comic and pretty much never dull. She conveys a society on the one hand almost broken with corruption, unfairness, outdated customs and at the same time exuberant and multifarious. Weirdly the title story, one of her most famous because it led to a ridiculous obscenity charge, is the least impressive; she was young at the time and couldn't quite handle the unaware narrator. Much more memorable is "A Pair of Hands" in which the wife of a poor man (a sweeper of refuse, away in the army), gives birth to a son who, given the dates, can't possibly he his. The master and mistress of the rich household in which the couple are employed are baffled by the servants' reaction: the erring wife's mother-in-law, though she knows perfectly well that the child can't be her son's, is delighted with it and the husband, when he comes home, reacts the same way, as if he doesn't understand the truth. In the end the master (who is the narrator's father) tries to explain:

"But the boy is not yours, Ram Autar - it's that bastard Ram Rati's" Abba exclaimed in exasperation.
"So what is the difference, sir? Ram Rati is my cousin, his blood is the same as mine."
"You're a stupid fool!" Abba was losing patience.
"Sir, when the child grows up he will help out," Ram Autar tried to explain in a pleading tone. He will contribute his two hands, sir, and he will be my support in my old age". Ram Autar lowered his head with these words.

And who knows why, Abba's head, like Ram Autar's was also lowered, as if thousands of hands were bearing down on it... these hands were neither legitimate nor illegitimate, they were only hands, living hands that wash away the filth from the face of this planet, that carry the weight of its aging.

Ram Autar's attitude is coloured by poverty; with no security for the future except the work of his own hands, he can't afford to be too fussy about where a priceless asset like a healthy son came from. But he, who is thought to be dull-witted, has come closer to appreciating what really matters than his educated employer. In the same way, the young couple in "Sacred Duty" see past the prejudices of their parents and treat them with the disdain they deserve. Chughtai never minimises the problems in her society and the pain they cause, especially to women, and some of the stories end grimly but there is a tremendous life-force in her writing that often ends up triumphing over what would suppress it.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Quilt-Other-Stories-Tahira-Naqvi/dp/1878818341/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1421498413&sr=8-4&keywords=chughtai+the+quilt

I came across this workshop script on a old memory stick (maybe they should be forgettery sticks) and thought I'd post it here.

Narrative workshop

"Yes--oh dear yes--the novel tells a story" – E M Forster

I've used that quote often enough with students, mainly male ones, whose idea of a short story was one damn thing after another, incidents piling up faster than you could take them in and characters being killed off before you could learn their names, let alone what they were like. We wave Joyce's Dubliners at them, as proof that very little actually needs to happen in a story as long as something changes or develops, and of course that's true; a purely plot synopsis of "The Dead" might be something like "Gabriel attends a rather dull party at his aunts', goes home, and it snows".

But the Forster quote is one I am less sympathetic to now. It's been coming on for some time, but I first knew I'd altered when I read some short stories submitted to a Leaf competition.

They were considered, crafted pieces, very interested in character and motivation. People sifted their memories, analysed their relationships, attached enormous importance to tiny observations which you later realised were metaphors for their lives. It was like watching one of those award-winning French films where everyone sits around a table talking for two hours and nothing actually happens. After reading about 20 of them, I had mentally replaced Forster's quote with one from Sheridan's The Critic - commenting on a new play, someone says: "I think it wants incident". I would have killed for a story with incidents, a narrative line, above all the age-old hook of "what happens next".

Sure, I still wanted to get to know the characters, but it struck me that I could just as well do that while they were doing something interesting. I used to have a workshop exercise where I asked people to describe someone, but without using any adjectives, adverbs or abstract nouns. So you couldn't say a person was kind, or acted kindly, or displayed kindness. Your only option was to show him doing something that illustrated that quality. I thought at the time that I was encouraging students to write more vividly, to show rather than tell. But I wonder now if I wasn't just unconsciously missing the element of storytelling in writing.

This element is, after all, about the most ancient there is. Even now, there are cultures where people still come together in the café or marketplace to listen to a storyteller or ballad-singer, and it's where a great deal of classical Western literature came from. Of course The Odyssey, to cite one of the earliest novels, is more than a story; of course it says a great deal about the themes of home, of belonging, of finding oneself via journeying. But it keeps you reading principally by keeping you on tenterhooks as to how on earth Odysseus is going to get out of his latest difficulty. Nor does it ever have to take time out to draw his character, to tell you he is ruthless, resourceful, a survivor; he tells you that himself through everything he says and does.

The attitude implied in the Forster quote is that the narrative aspect of novels is, for the writer, a necessary but dull kind of journeyman work which gets in the way of the fancy writing he really wants to concentrate on, the big set-piece emotional scenes perhaps, or dialogue, or description. I'm not sure he did mean it quite like that, but in any event it strikes me as a terrible waste to regard incident like that, rather than as a potentially useful tool. Oddly enough I think it can be particularly useful in the kind of novel that wants to concentrate on the unravelling of character or the long explication of a theme, because these novels still need, somehow or other, to keep the reader's attention from wandering.

Two novels from the Glamorgan Masters in Writing course seem to me to illustrate that very well. Dan Rhodes's Timoleon Vieta Come Home (Canongate) had a narrative structure unusual for a modern novel, and I think a lot of reviewers didn't really get where it was coming from. For the first half it moved like a novel, charting the shifting pattern of relationship between three characters, two men and a dog. But in the second half, the dog is a long way off, trying to get back home. From then on, the novel shifts between men and dog, and the dog's half is a series of episodes connected only by how they move the dog closer to home – or sometimes not. Some critics took this to indicate that Dan was still at heart a short story writer who hadn't quite mastered the novel form yet, which only shows they hadn't read The Odyssey very recently. Each episode of Odysseus's journey highlights another aspect of him, and of the nature of journeying and homecoming. Timoleon Vieta's journey is an odyssey in love, and each episode shows another aspect of that troublesome emotion. They're all fascinating in themselves, but they are also stages on the dog's journey and, essentially, what happens to him next. And of course that aspect makes the novel remarkably hard to put down.

Another student's novel in progress concerns the long unravelling of a character's mental state, both in his own words and as observed by his sister. It has to be slow, by its very nature, and it also happens that these characters are modern-day students, which means, to be honest, that their daily lives are not full of riveting incident. This poses an obvious problem in keeping the reader interested when, unavoidably, not a lot is going on. The author's solution to this strikes me as really quite inspired: the siblings' mother was a teller of folk tales which the sister in particular recalls, and every so often, one of these tales is interpolated into the action. It's clear that they are a sort of metaphorical counterpoint to what is going on in her brother's head, but what they also are is a narrative fix for the reader. The author is very good at inventing and adapting the stuff of folk tale and whenever I read a chunk of this novel for the workshop I couldn't help mentally perking up whenever the familiar lexis appeared: "There was once a young man….."

This hunger for story is so basic to our nature that it would seem at the least unprofitable for writers to ignore or downplay it. I've heard it suggested, and to some extent I believe it, that the reason many adults today read children's books is to get the intense narrative fix that some literary fiction denies them. We have to write the themes that are nagging at us, but the clothes they wear are our choice, and if we can convey them partly via a cracking good story, it certainly isn't going to hurt their chances of popularity with readers. I do, by the way, think this can apply to poems too. Because of the condensed utterance of poems, poets are rightly worried about being over-narrative, of simply telling one damn thing after another. But the techniques of cinematography, of cutting between scenes rather than tracking, can help here, as can putting a lot of the action into back-story that is never more than partly explained. I think Rosie Shepperd's poems do this a lot, and the narrative line, however disguised and broken up, not only adds interest to the poems but allows the reader to get an initial handle on them and what they're about.

The only proper thing to do at this point is to read a story, and this is my favourite ever written. It's a fine illustration, apart from anything else, of how the very device of someone telling a story can be used to advantage. Where there is a narrative there is necessarily a narrator, and he isn't always the same person as the author, which gives said author the chance to do some amazing things with the dual perspective. This is a self-contained tale told in the course of a much longer book, the Satyricon of Petronius. The man who tells it, a character called Eumolpus, has already been established as a shallow, materialistic lecher. He tells the story in a misogynistic spirit, believing it reflects badly on women as faithless and sensual (very like himself), and frequently uses words like "loving wife" and "virtuous woman" in irony, no doubt with a huge wink.

But Eumolpus is not Petronius, and the further we get into the tale, the clearer it becomes that Petronius, lurking at his narrator's back, does not share his views. The ultimate irony is that the words Eumolpus uses in irony are true in fact: the woman is indeed loving, virtuous and honest, and a lot more so at the end of the tale than she was at the start.

THE TALE OF THE WIDOW OF EPHESUS

There was a married woman in Ephesus of such famous virtue that she drew women even from the neighbouring states to gaze upon her.
So when she had buried her husband, the common fashion of following the procession with loose hair, and beating the naked breast in front of the crowd, did not satisfy her. She followed the dead man even to his resting place, and began to watch and weep night and day over the body, which was laid in an underground vault in the Greek fashion. Neither her parents nor her relations could divert her from thus torturing herself, and courting death by starvation. The officials were at last rebuffed and left her. Everyone mourned for her as a woman of unique character, and she was now passing her fifth day without food. A devoted maid sat by the failing woman, shed tears in sympathy with her woes, and at the same time filled up the lamp, which was placed in the tomb, whenever it sank.
There was but one opinion throughout the city, every class of person admitting this was the one true and brilliant example of chastity and love.
At this moment the governor of the province gave orders that some robbers should be crucified near the small building where the lady was bewailing her recent loss. So on the next night, when the soldier who was watching the crosses, to prevent anyone taking down a body for burial, observed a light shining plainly among the tombs, and heard a mourner's groans, a very human weakness made him curious to know who it was and what he was doing. So he went down into the vault, and on seeing a very beautiful woman, at first halted in confusion, as if he had seen a portent or some ghost from the world beneath. But afterwards noticing the dead man lying there, and watching the woman's tears and the marks of her nails on her face, he came to the correct conclusion, that she found her regret for the lost one unendurable.
He therefore brought his supper into the tomb, and began to urge the mourner not to persist in useless grief, and break her heart with unprofitable sobs: for all men made the same end and found the same resting place, and so on with the other platitudes which restore wounded spirits to health. But she took no notice of his sympathy, struck and tore her breast more violently than ever, pulled out her hair, and laid it on the dead body.
Still the soldier did not retire, but tried to give the poor woman food with similar encouragements, until the maid, who was no doubt seduced by the smell of his wine, first gave in herself, and put out her hand at his kindly invitation, and then, refreshed with food and drink, began to assail her mistress's obstinacy, and say, "What will you gain by all this, if you faint away with hunger, if you bury yourself alive, if you breathe out your undoomed soul before fate calls for it? Do you think the ashes of the dead can feel your pain? Will you not begin life afresh? Will you not shake off this womanish failing, and enjoy the blessings of the light so long as you are allowed? Your poor dead husband's body here ought to persuade you to keep alive."
People are always ready to listen when they are urged to take a meal or to keep alive. So the lady, being thirsty after several days' abstinence, allowed her resolution to be broken down, and filled herself with food as greedily as the maid, who had been the first to yield.
Well, you know which temptation generally assails a man on a full stomach. The soldier used the same insinuating phrases which had persuaded the lady to consent to live, to conduct an assault upon her virtue. Her modest eye saw in him a young man, handsome and eloquent.
The maid begged her to be gracious, and then said, "Wilt thou fight love even when love pleases thee?
I need hide the fact no longer. The lady ceased to hold out, and the conquering hero won her over entire. So they passed not only their wedding night together, but the next and a third, of course shutting the door of the vault, so that any friend or stranger who came to the tomb would imagine that this most virtuous lady had breathed the last over her husband's body. Well, the soldier was delighted with the woman's beauty, and his stolen pleasure. He bought up all the fine things his means permitted, and carried them to the tomb the moment darkness fell.
So the parents of one of the crucified, seeing that the watch was ill-kept, took their man down in the dark and administered the last rite to him. The soldier was eluded while he was off duty, and next day, seeing one of the crosses without its corpse, he was in terror of punishment, and explained to the lady what had happened. He declared that he would not wait for a court-martial, but would punish his own neglect with a thrust of his sword. So she had better get ready a place for a dying man, and let the gloomy vault enclose both her husband and her lover.
The lady's heart was tender as well as pure. "Heaven forbid," she replied, "that I should look at the same moment on the dead bodies of two men whom I love. No, I would rather make a dead man useful, than send a live man to death."
After this speech she ordered her husband's body to be taken out of the coffin and fixed up on the empty cross. The soldier availed himself of this far-seeing woman's device, and the people wondered the next day by what means the dead man had ascended the cross.
...

Now that story has a lot to say on a lot of themes. Honesty and self-knowledge, the self-knowledge that the widow achieves in the course of the story and that Eumolpus the narrator will never achieve. The overriding importance of being alive, the reason that reverence for the dead, though it has its place, can never be anywhere near as important as care for the living. The way people can make the world more tolerable for each other. But it conveys all this via one device: narrative. It makes a man tell a story, and in the process tell us more than he knows he is telling or meant to tell. Things happen: there is a very literal structure and movement, mainly of people between the tomb and the outside world so that in the end the dead are outside and the tomb has become a place of life and love. It also, of course, avails itself of narrative's other prime device: choosing where to end, in this case when the structure is satisfyingly complete and the parties have attained knowledge of who they are and what they want. If we think about it, we know something else must now happen; presumably the soldier and the widow must make a break for it some night and run away together. But we don't need to know how that happens; the story has got to the point where we could write the next bit ourselves.

Next time you feel "blocked", try telling yourself not that you have to write about such and such a theme, or develop character X, but that you have to tell a story. It's surprising how it concentrates the mind.

This is a collection of short stories (pub. Salt 2010) and ever since Joyce, the one thing we've known about a short story is that it should have an epiphany: ie, at some point something should become clear, either to us or to the protagonist, that wasn't clear before, and that changes everything. One of the most interesting things about these stories is the way Rickards sometimes subverts the epiphany, by subtly implying that though the protagonist has indeed found out something new about himself or the world, this new-found knowledge is not in fact going to change anything; things will go on much as they did before. In the title story, the materialistic Dominic finds himself having fun in a way totally independent of the money and social cachet on which he generally depends for enjoyment, but you could lay bets that he will not, next morning, sell all he has and give the money to the poor. In "Mango", a failing marriage, seen through a child's eyes, gets a sudden boost of happiness and all seems well at the end, but an adult reader can easily deduce that the respite is temporary and does not address the real problems in the relationship. And in "The Last of Her", Jo, having been welcomed at a vulnerable time into the home of what seems a kind couple, has to reassess them in the light of their conduct to someone else, but again you could bet she is not going to walk virtuously out on the comfort she needs.

Sometimes Rickards does use the epiphany in a more traditional way; in "Odissi Dancing" it does feel as if a woman's self-image has been permanently altered, and in "Ultimate Satisfaction Everyday", Greg, who's always thought of himself as a loser, finds out not so much that he is or isn't, more that nobody has the right to make such a judgement about what anybody's life is "worth". In "Life Pirates" there are practically two stories running in tandem, the one most people see, involving a drunken tramp in a park, and the quite different one seen by the narrator, who knows him.

There are a few stories that don't work for me, notably "Moon" which I don't see the point of and "Moleman" in which the tempting metaphor in a real situation has completely taken over the story to the point where it reads like an exercise. But as a collection, this is massively more worth reading than some considerably more hyped ones I've read lately. Where these stories end happily or at least in temporary contentment, it is often because of some apparently trivial thing: the taste of a mango, the gift of some dog biscuits, the budding of an apparently dead tree, can be enough to turn a situation, a mood, even a way of seeing the world.