From June to August I’ve been indulging in what I’ve called ‘short story summer’. The first few books (Irving, Hoffman and Pu Songling) could all be linked to the eighteenth century, and the last four are one of my big reads - which left three short story collections sort of loose and unaccounted for. So I reviewed them here.
Fancies and Goodnights by John Collier
Having read John Collier’s Tom’s A-Cold (which I very much enjoyed) and His Monkey Wife (which I didn’t enjoy as much), I decided to read Fancies and Goodnights, a collection of short stories. Ray Bradbury’s introduction was about how influential Collier had been on him, as well as on The Twilight Zone and Alfred Hitchcock Presents, with a number of the stories being adapted for those shows. One of his stories also inspired Little Shop of Horrors and one of Stephen Sondheim’s earliest musicals. They seemed worth a read.
One of the first things I noticed was that these stories are frequently actual stories. This may seem redundant, but I’ve often read a modern short story collection where the pieces seem like excerpts of novels or just.. interesting bits of writing. These stories actually have beginnings, middles and endings for the most part, the endings usually having a twist - and that twist usually being murder. This was the weakness of this collection, where most of the stories would be very enjoyable in the context of a magazine or by itself, the construction of them becomes quite plain and the twists quite predictable.
Collier’s total aversion to women and marriage also comes across very plainly throughout the collection also. Almost all the women in the stories fall under the category of innocent, sexual harpy and nag. Pretty much any story with a married couple in them will end with the wife being murdered, usually framed in a way that it’s a comeuppance for their sexual harpyness, their nagging or as a result of their innocence. There was misogyny in His Monkey Wife which rubbed against the larky telling and that feeling multiplies across 30-odd stories.
My favourite story, ‘Mary’ did actual portray a sweet love story. A young man and woman fall in love. He’s a showman who tours an intelligent pig called Mary, who he lives with in a caravan as they tour. The woman moves in and they travel together, with the woman growing more and more jealous of Mary the pig, who seems to revel in her position above the wife. Of course someone dies on the story, but that someone is a spoilt pig.
Another good story is the very first one ‘The Bottle Shop’ where a man buys a genie but things don’t turn out as he wished. What makes it fun is the mundane way the shop is depicted against the magic things it sells. I enjoyed the story about the people living in department stores, the one where superstitious villagers believe a man’s chequebook contains magic money, the one about a flea who feels the feelings of everyone he’s bitten. There were two stories about a man burying his wife under the house which would have worked better if they had been swapped around.
Collier manages to have a lot of variety in the setting and tone of the stories. Some feel more American, others more English, they are told in different voices and registers, he can often pull out a surprising simile. Collier is a good writer and many of the stories are good but the clockwork behind them, which is so satisfying at first, does get tedious. I’d recommend We All Hear Stories in the Dark by Robert Shearman, which does the weird story thing with more warmth, wit and variety.
Honeydew by Edith Pearlman
Edith Pearlman has a really fitting name, as each of the pieces in this book feel like little pearls. They grow like pearls, identifying a little grit in a characters life but develop into positive, hopeful depictions of the world which makes them enjoyable and precious. I’d be reluctant about calling these stories though.
For example, ‘Blessed Harry’ is about a man who receives a scam email asking him to talk about ‘the mystery of life and death’, which leads him to think about his life. We learn about his job, wife, children and the deceased Uncle James, who used to live with them. We also are told about Harry, a houseplant which clings to life and is a part of their daily routines. When he finds out the email is a scam, he comforts himself in the love of his family and wonders why the plant keeps on living. As such, we are introduced to the characters, they feel real and loveable and you wish them the best. They do things and feel things and think things. It’s all conveyed with ease and a good eye for a striking detail. Yet, it’s not quite a story. All the ingredients are there, events, characters, theme but they don’t all pull together exactly.
It’s odd, because some of these pieces are packed with stuff, ‘Castle 4’ has a cast of hundreds, a number of locations, dual love stories, tales of connection, healing and peaceful death - but it still doesn’t quite cohere into a story shape. It means that I was enjoying the book a great deal but always slightly unsatisfied. The blurb says the stories contain ‘whole lives in ten pages’ and they do, but whole lives are not stories, that’s why biographies often fall flat.
Many of the pieces are set in the same fictional neighbourhood, with a number set in an antique shop owned by a woman called Rennie. She makes it a rule to never get involved in the lives of her customers but inevitably breaks the rule all the time. I found her charming and I’d like to visit her shop.
The book is still an enjoyable experience though. Most of the pieces have a comforting vision of humanity and community, people usually come together in them and they are reminders of goodness in a world that often seems uninterested in them. While the lack of stories bugged me, the characters were very well drawn, vivd and layered and real. There’s a lot to like in Honeydew, even if I couldn’t love it.
The Complete Short Stories by Muriel Spark
Muriel Spark is a writer who manages to write the novels that only Muriel Spark could write. I find them a little hit and miss but I always find them interesting and unique. How would I fair with Spark’s ventures into a notably hit and miss genre, short stories? In short, hit and miss - but with far more hits than misses.
These stories range from her earliest works to some written shortly before her death. The collection seems a little haphazard, certainly not in chronological order but the first few stories (and among her earliest) all deal with having dual nationality in England and The Colony - now Zimbabwe, but then, Rhodesia. The Colony is painted as something of a living hell, at least a purgatory. It’s dry, hot, intense and violent. Almost all these stories involve a ‘shooting incident’ and these are depicted as perfectly ordinary events.
The racial perspective in these stories is interesting. The English people (and those of English descent) are depicted as trapped, often drunk and yearning for the quiet, muted raininess of England. The native population largely feature as scenery, serving in crowd scenes or as background but never as characters in themselves. It’s the Dutch who are the wildcards, and are always the people pulling the triggers in these shooting incidents. These general groups of people are pretty much fixed in place for all the stories set in The Colony, as if Spark can’t perceive them falling out in any other way.
Out of these stories, I probably most enjoyed Bang Bang, You’re Dead, in which an elderly person is being shown seemingly idyllic, exotic videos taken of her but remembers the far more grubby reality. I was also entertained and bemused by The Pawnbroker’s Daughter, which includes a family who use their little power to insist on a family-wide delusion. The Go-Away Bird was almost a novella, and told a full story that seemed to mainly exist for the punchline at the end.
One of the things I love about Muriel Spark, that also infuriates me, is the way she often occludes some of the character motivations or reasons behind things. In A Playhouse Called Remarkable a friend of the narrator claims to be an ancient being from the moon who brought culture down to earth. Most strangely, the stone age residents of Hamstead Heath have a mayor, town hall and press, but only one entertainment, chanting ‘tum tum ya’. It’s got a very grisly end. In The Twins, the reader has to put together clues to conclude that a couple’s children are manipulating them and everyone around them. Nothing is outright stated though. Generally if Spark states something, it’s categorically not the truth in the story.
The stories are mostly told in the first person from someone at an angle to the story. This is one of the things that make the worlds she paints so obtuse. Sometimes the narrator sounds like it may be Spark herself, many of these are writers. The narrator of The Snobs watches two very persistent social climbers trying to bag a stay in a French chateau (the narrator also says she’s met them before, but doesn’t elaborate where. In Harper and Wilson the narrator is pestered by the characters from an unfinished manuscript. She claims Ladies and Gentlemen was based on a true event and it’s fun to wonder how many of the other stories were.
Spark does a fun line in ghosts and ghost adjacent stuff. One line from the stories I had come across before was the reveal, “that’s when he murdered me”. Another has a woman wandering around in her daily routine, aware she’s forgotten something - only to find the thing she had forgotten was her body, which is laying murdered. There’s a man who is alive but whose ghost lives with his mum as a separate entity, and another story about a psychiatrist haunted by a pearly shadow. Mrs Pinkerton’s Apocalypse only seems to exist to make puns about flying saucers.. that was an odd one.
Two of the most peculiar stories follow each other, one I loved and one I did not. You Should Have Seen the Mess was about a working class woman who doesn’t realise how much the upper classes love their mess, mouldering piles of stuff and mismatched chairs. She even turns down a very (financially) rewarding husband because he’s so untidy - because she doesn’t realise cleanliness is a poor person’s virtue. Quest for Lavishes Ghast is about someone who hears that phrase everywhere and decides it must mean something. I can see how the story may have come about, a mishearing that created an intriguing phrase, but it comes off as more irritating than anything else.
However, most of these stories are both entertaining and satisfying, packed full of the uniqueness that makes Muriel Spark a writer worth visiting.
