SHORT STORIES: A.L. Kennedy's new collection of stories puts under the microscope the convoluted intricacies of sexual desire and of intimate relationships. She executes this scrutiny in stories which are classically spare, economical, and taut, writes Éilís Ní Dhuibhne.
Indelible Acts. By A.L. Kennedy. Jonathan Cape, 272pp. £12.99
Everything which is not relevant is stripped away. Often the stories feel too bare and unfurnished for my taste, which likes a bit of clutter. But her prose is lovely: agile, precise and rich. It compensates for much, as does her tart sense of humour.
Most of the stories, studded with brightly original insights, deal with the human need for love, particularly sexual love, although one extremely effective one concerns the toughening of a sensitive young boy who has suffered too much as a result of his parents' conflicts. "His mother let everything matter, that's why she hurt. Please make me not feel a thing." (Inner monologues are frequently deployed to good effect). Powerful attraction is delineated brilliantly and graphically in stories such as 'Spared' and 'An Immaculate Man', the first about an extra-marital heterosexual relationship and the second about, well, an extra-marital homosexual relationship. (Kennedy writes equally convincingly about male and female, gay and heterosexual, desire.) In both these stories, men in the grip of intense lust find themselves finally unnerved by its fulfilment, and the stories which initially describe the physical connections in terms which push the prose to the edge of the pornographic swerve and push it back into the realms of ordinary morality. The protagonists are honest both about the relentlessness of desire and the implications of infidelity (which the immaculate men know all too well, being divorce lawyers).
Throughout the collection Kennedy follows the complex, tortuous, twists and turns of sexual feelings along a labyrinth of love and hate, compromise and despair, morality and recklessness. She is an intrepid explorer and accurate cartographer of the dark jungles of eros.
Two of the finest stories are the softest in tone and end, unusually, on a fairly positive note. 'How to find your way in the woods' affirms that true love can last - interestingly this discovery is made in a pretty New England wood, far from the bleak urban settings of many of the darker stories. In 'A Little Like Light', a story about a janitor embarking on an affair with a teacher who will not consummate the relationship but will consent to go to the pictures with him occasionally, he decides "The best love is like a little light. It is unremitting, cannot fail to find you, to take the shortest surest way".
Like almost everyone in the stories, this janitor, who suffers from minor brain damage caused by a childhood accident, expresses himself in the style of someone with a 2.1 in English from St. Andrews or Oxford. Kennedy is Scottish, but there is not much sense of Scotland, still less of its languages, in the book, presumably deliberately. One character, however, listens to the news in Gaelic once but alas does not understand the solitary highland broadcaster. Perhaps Kennedy does.The dedication is in Gaelic - rud nach gcíofá go minic ar leabhar le húdar a bhuaigh an Somerset Maugham Award. It's nice to see the cupla focal in an unlikely context.
Éilís Ní Dhuibhne is a fiction writer