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Lily Einhorn
posted 1 February 2007

This is what I think a short story is: (I know, reviewers are not supposed to make use of the personal pronoun, so ugly. The Me. So I do apologise for my vulgarity. The thing is though; the short story is a tricky beast. Short stories seem to be different things to different people, to represent different literary genres, to gain and diminish in importance with the turning of the tides… Enough? I think so).

And so.

A short story is a self-contained narrative that is shorter than a novel. It is a one-act play, in novel form, if you will. (I will.) Shall we leave it at that? A short story is short? In the foreword to this book, Alexander Linklater writes that this question is 'buried in the origins of human grammar and will keep being answered for as long as language survives'. So there you go. Until the human race ceases to communicate with language, the short story will be defined by its lack of definition. Are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin.

This book, a compilation of five short stories published by Atlantic Books, is the culmination of a hunt to find the best short story by published writers in Britain, in an attempt to re-invigorate the art form. And it seems, on the whole, to have worked. The first in the collection is 'The Flyover' by Rana Dasgupta, a tale made up of succinct, bite-sized details that roll easily off the page. Language is used sparingly, without the need to over elaborate or labour a point: '"I don't know why I keep coming back here for you." The next time, she did not. Marlboro never saw her again.' The story is a beautiful evocation not only of another culture, with all of its idiosyncrasies, corruptions and characters, but also of the mind of a man in turmoil. All of the wrong decisions are made for the wrong reasons until he ends up, quite literally, boxed in with nowhere to go.

Michael Faber's contribution, 'The Safehouse', has a similarly merciless ending. Written in the first person, there is an uneasy immediacy to this disquieting tale of loss and self-delusion. In a starkly Orwellian world where people are reduced to a cryptic configuration of numbers and letters written on the backs of their t-shirts, we lose ourselves amidst the tide of 'consensual hopelessness'. Faber's world is an eerie one of grey and white, silence and rules. Inmates of the safehouse, lost to themselves, are convinced to become one of the many by the very fact of their being there at all. It is an unspoken pact, and we are complicit in this acceptance by being unable to question it. It's a strange story, by turns compelling and unsatisfying; this world in need of explanation or context. There is something beyond the confines of the narrative, and we need to know what it is.

'An Anxious Man' is an altogether more traditional offering, with a beginning, a middle and an end, but this lack of originality of form does not do its author, James Lasdun, any disservice. As an evocation of a collapse of intimacy, of modern anxiety and disquietude, it is perfect. Reading this story is an uncomfortable experience; the narrator's awareness of his own, palpable, anxiety; his distaste for his own greed and self-consciousness, traps us into the claustrophobia of another's thoughts. It a modern morality tale - an Aesop's fable for the Naughties - but with a protagonist who squanders his chance at redemption and freedom. Faced with a seemingly horrific situation he makes a Faustian pact to abandon the shackles of his commodity-driven existence if only the situation is rectified. It is, and he doesn't. He remains as he realises he is, with the 'abiding sense of himself as a flawed and fallen human being'. There is no quick fix for him or for us, no answer, and yet this is the most complete, and satisfying, story of the five. It has hope amidst the hopelessness, as if the simple realisation of the battle is one step closer to winning the war.

The last two stories both display people with a similar lack of control over their own circumstances - a theme running throughout the whole collection. Rose Tremain's 'The Ebony Hand' is tinged with that very English post-war sadness. A nostalgia, not for what has been, but for what might have been, weaves through this patchwork quilt of a story, as the lives of an aunt and daughter are sewn together by circumstance and misfortune. This is the kind of world where events happen with no explanation, decisions are arbitrary and madness is just around the corner. It a strange combination of the prim English and the passionate Spanish that does not quite convince, and the ending comes just as all are lost, and the reader's attention is slowly creeping away through the country lanes.

'Men of Ireland' by William Trevor is set in a similarly rural society and acts as a portrait of one man; a street, a city, a life lost. Displayed is a lack of control over even your own conscience, as a journey is embarked upon that can have only a dishonourable outcome. Compelled to act as his character dictates, the result is a disappointment in humanity, or rather, what can become of it. This is a story of the need to belong, and the paradoxical need to rebel against that impulse.

As a collection, the five stories are a portrait of modern unease. They display a dissatisfaction with contemporary life and all its trappings that is hard to articulate, and it is this elusive extra that these stories are striving to find; stretching out and brushing against salvation with eager finger tips, only to find it just out of reach.