Book Reviews - Review 271

An assured collection of short stories that all deal, directly or obliquely, with old age and its attendant themes: regret, disappointment, physical and mental decline, loneliness. In terms of craftsmanship and insight, this book is definite four-star material; but in terms of enjoyability it has to be marked down to three. For unqualified recommendation the tales are just too relentlessly gloomy; the tone is too relentlessly cool-headed; and the cleverness is at times too ostentatious.

The stories vary in their level of ambition. At the lower end of the scale, a man makes three visits to hairdressers', at three different stages of his life; a retired army officer takes a trip to his favourite prostitute in London, to find her dead; an ex-doctor with Alzheimer's responds to his wife's patient intellectual ministrations with streams of filthy talk. These are all perfectly decent ideas, convincingly relayed; but the stories are not spectacularly original in either conception or execution. And on the whole they are very depressing.

A couple of the modern-day stories gain more of the reader's attention. In one, two elderly widows meet once a month in a hotel restaurant in Seattle. They are mildly contemptuous of each other, but united by common circumstances, loneliness and boredom - and, it turns out, mutual knowledge of secrets about each other's dead husbands. As with the other stories here, the tone is dry and rather sour, but the psychological dynamic and the ending struck me as particularly clever.

Elsewhere, an ageing gay man vents his frustration at the disappearance of sex from his relationship by launching a vicious and petty war against coughing classical concertgoers. I found this story particularly interesting because of the imaginative understanding Barnes shows of sexual and emotional tensions peculiar to homosexual relationships.

Then there are the stories set in past times and in other European countries. In some ways, these are the most impressive, as they show Barnes' particular gift for absorbing the mores, manners and assumptions of other ages. The Story of Mats Israelson is the one I found most poignant: a Swedish timber merchant and a pharmacist's wife, both unhappily married, fall in love, their failure to elope with one another due less to a sense of propriety than to temperamental reticence. In one shrewd sentence Barnes sums up their situation: "But that was not how he was, because that was not how she was." It takes two to avoid an affair.

Impressive though all these stories are on some level, there is a lack in most of them of... one wouldn't say sympathy, but certainly warmth. Barnes' attitude seems to be that no amount of affection or good will stops the processes of ageing and dying, so why indulge them? His astringency is admirably unsentimental, but it doesn't make for cheering reading.

The biggest irritations for me, as usual, are Barnes' occasional lapses into preciousness or ponderousness. Sometimes his phrasing is just too finicky and arch, and one feels him too ready to compensate with intellectual cleverness what he lacks in passion. He enjoys playing "Have You Got It Yet?" with the reader, flattering the latter's erudition with coy hints, rather then telling us outright what's happening and getting on with the story. Thus, in The Story of Mats Israelson, a reader doubtful of the distinctions between Scandinavian vowels must wait two pages for confirmation that the scene is Sweden; in The Revival, the identity of the protagonist, a famous nineteenth-century novelist, is kept from us until the very last page; and in The Silence, the identity of the twentieth-century composer who is its subject is not revealed at all. If you've some knowledge of musical history, you'll probably guess after a couple of pages; otherwise, forget it. I don't think the writing gains by this kind of teasing; if Barnes had nothing interesting to say, one might understand it as a way of filling a vacuum; but since he does, it often has the unfortunate effect of making the penetrating seem merely meretricious.

All these are reasons why these very skillfully conceived stories impress just a little less than, by rights, they should.