Wednesday 10 November 2010

Hidden Short Stories

Short stories seems to have become newly fashionable. Long a staple of starting-out writers and the American creative writing scene, they are becoming so in vogue that established novelists are re-learning how to write the form.

And it is very different from the novel, which is as little appreciated as how different a short film is to a feature. You could start with Checkov, Chinua Achebe, Tolstoy, Kipling, Guy de Maupassant, Dahl.... or my dear friend Victoria Taylor Robert's Hidden & Other Stories.

It's an awkward and difficult form, and Vicky is completely in control of the effects it can achieve - the time spent in the company of very different, often very difficult characters - their situations, their outlook, their place in life, but especially their view out and towards the 'life' that's generally swirling around them in careless and damagingly carefree ways. In her hands, the story tends to creep up on you, you are in a mind, and as the gloom slowly dissipates, you perceive clearly a life, a person you thought could never imagine being, but now are fully imagined within, the contours, shapes and feeling of that life clear, in sparse, carefully controlled detail.

And the endings? Vicky controls her endings with clarity and economy - never the cheap, over-obvious reversal, but a sly dig, a ping back into the story that led up to it, a re-shaping or re-casting of the story in a subtly different light, giving a resonance beyond the end, causing the life to reverberate just a bit further and longer than you expected.

Of course there are some stories I didn't take to, some that left me cold, but more that left me slightly shaken, slightly disturbed from the main flow of 'life' as most of us live it. And that's where her characters come from - the edges, the margins, the lost and forgotten, and are the more powerful for that.

Highly recommended.