Short Stories Alice Munro is held by many critics to be one of the greatest short story writers. She is constantly mentioned in the same breath as Chekhov.
In Canada she regularly wins literary awards, and a hagiographic article in a recent edition of the New York Times wondered why the Swedish Academy had not yet offered her the Nobel. She is a regular contributor to the New Yorker. She is unusual in that she writes short stories exclusively, but, using that generally unmarketable genre, she has become a commercial as well as a literary success, making fiction which is eminently entertaining and also subtly innovative. Any new story by Alice Munro, let alone a new collection, has to be welcomed with open arms.
Writers with a long career suffer the dubious compliment of having their later work compared to their earlier. Runaway is not as exuberant, as colourful or as humorous as most of Munro's previous collections - neither the sparkling energy of the early books such as The Beggar Maid or the mellow sensuousness of the mid-career collections such as Friend of My Youth, are very evident here. It is entertaining and perfectly narrated but somewhat spare, uncompromisingly interrogatory. Alice Munro is in her 70s. Her world view is not the same as it was 20 or 30 years ago. It would be disappointing if it were.
Munro, who is apparently reluctant to give interviews about her work, has often, within the parameters of her fiction itself, declared her artistic purpose. In the earlier books, it was to write about life as it was in the rural communities of Ontario where she grew up; the metaphor of photography is invoked in Lives of Girls and Women. Of course she did much more than paint pictures but the protagonists in the first stories - girls and women, critical, slightly marginal - belonged to their communities, and the backdrop was depicted in vivid detail.
No great writer remains static. Alice Munro tells the same "stories" again and again - aficionados will recognise at least two versions of old favourites among the eight stories in Runaway - but her ideas change. In her last two collections, and especially in this one, the celebration of community which was a hallmark of her earlier fiction is not at all evident. In the story 'Soon', for instance, Chagall's picture, The Village and I, is the central image of the story.
The "I" discovers that the village is considerably less accommodating than she once believed.
What happens in most of these stories is just that move - the "I" distances itself from the group. It moves away to the desert, as it were, and finds that finally it is alone.
Many of the protagonists in these stories are old; even where they are not death affects them, appearing, in one guise or another, in every one of the eight tales. Death, however, is not the issue, but the queries about life which somebody considering mortality might well ponder. The particular question underpinning many of the stories is the simple but crucial philosophical one: is there a pattern to life, or is it governed by chance? As often before Munro's literary purpose is revealed within a story: "She was not going to say it [her book] was about ancient Greece and the considerable attachment the Greeks had to the irrational", Juliet, a young student of classics, thinks, in the story entitled, bluntly, 'Chance'. Juliet is the protagonist in three interlinked stories, a novella within the collection, which narrate her life from youth to old age. In these tales, chance and design (in the shape of personality) mingle to shape her life. Cards are dealt and she plays them well enough, but tragedy of monumental proportion occurs. The question the author invites us to consider is whether Juliet invites tragedy, or whether it happens in spite of anything she could do? The same question is posed in several stories in this collection.
Apart from the theme of fate versus chance, Alice Munro addresses other questions in the stories, also relating to what is important in the life of any individual. 'Passion' could be regarded as a new version of an old Munro story. (It occurs as 'What is Remembered' in her last book). It is a "brief encounter" story, in which a chance meeting changes the life of its heroine, Grace, and a few hours of platonic passion becomes a memory which sustains her forever. Alice Munro suggests that "soul mates" exist and this is one of the answers she proposes here, and has proposed in other stories, to the question of what really matters, of what is transcendent. There are others. Juliet, for instance, in the trio of aforementioned stories, has a special gift, her love of the classics - "Because she was not teaching Greek she put it away. That is what happens. You put it away for a little while, and now and again you look in the closet for something else and you remember, you think, soon . . . The thing that was your bright treasure . . . A loss you could not contemplate at one time, and now it becomes something you barely remember". In the end, the final stage, when Juliet has thrown off the trappings of her life, she reads all the time. She suffers enormous losses, but her intellectual treasure she retains.
This book too is a treasure. But for readers who have not read Munro before, I sense it is not the best place to start. It would be wiser to begin with an early work, or in the middle and move on to this, a work of her maturity. For those familiar with her work, however, the collection is a precious gem. It is a pleasure to observe the progress of a great writer as her stories grow, change and develop over the course of a long productive life. An incomparable pleasure, and a rare one. Some writers go on writing but do not change; some writers stop writing; some, like Chekhov, or indeed Raymond Carver, die too young, leaving us to wonder how they would have developed. With Alice Munro we don't need to speculate. She has lived and written on, and changed. Yeats, I think, said that hard thinking was the basis of good art. Alice Munro is lyrical, painterly, comic, but she is a thinker. Her ideas mature with every book. This is a real cause for literary celebration.
Éilís Ní Dhuibhne is Writer Fellow at Trinity College, Dublin
Runaway By Alice Munro Chatto & Windus, 335pp. £15.99