Short Stories

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31576, 13 January 1968, Page 4

Short Stories

A Romantic Hero. By Olivia i Manning. Heinemann. 254 i PP- v There is a haunting, nostal- ! gic air about many of the ! fourteen stories in this coilec- : tion, particularly those set in . Ireland. They were written be- J tween 1938 and 1966 and some ‘ of them have already been s published in magazines and j collections of short stories. . Several of the stories have { masculine philandering as ; their theme, but the author , writes with a compassion that t encompasses all those inevi- ( tably involved in such a situ- s ation husband, wife, chil- j dren and mistress. The emo- • tional distress felt by the t children of quarrelling par- i ents is not so much a content- < porary experience seen 1 through the child’s eyes as the melancholy wistfulness of - an adult looking back. In direct contrast to these is the story of “The Man Who Stole the Tiger,” an ironical little tale of a soldier recently re- s covered from tuberculosis 1 who steals a tiger from a zoo s in Jerusalem and attempts to 1 return it to its natural habi- > tat, using all his skills as a 1 former Borstal boy to effect 1 his theft and get-away. Miss Manning’s prose has a ’ lucid precision that immedi- 1 ately conjures up with great ' vividness the backgrounds in 1 which she sets her characters, 1 from the lonely, rain-soaked 1 shores of Ireland to the ach- ‘ ingly cold winter scenes in war-time Rumania. “The Ro- 1 mantic Hero” of the title is a young man whose desires lean first to one sex and then to the other. Convinced that he is destined for supreme happiness and rare experiences, Harold sees himself as a cultured intellectual having thrown off his beginnings over a grocery shop in Bradford and become an elocutionist His girl friend is less impressed by his qualities and a young man he meets on a train journey finds him frankly comic. Miss Manning writes with great delicacy and again achieves a balance of sympathy in the reader’s mind for the three characters. These are stories of the excellence one would expect from a writer of renown. The Man Who Doubted. By Jack Cope. 247 pp. Heinemann. It is rare in these days to find a book with a South African setting in which the author takes no obvious stand and makes no pleas for black or white. In this, his second book of short stories. Jack Cope, editor of a leading South African literary journal, writes with impartiality of his country. The 12 stories encompass, among others, the lives of an unhappy Jew who finds a reason for living through his chance meeting with a small boy fishing illegally from a wharf, a Greek girt married by proxy to an aged Greek

man living in South Africa, ] and an anthropologist and his ( wife who find the leader of j the baboons they are study- ( ing prepared to emulate ( human activities beyond join- j ing them in a drink of gin, , and weeping at a melancholy ( tune played on a mouth organ. ( The author makes it clear, j whether he is writing of the 1 Boer storekeeper demanding , payment by the natives of non-existent debts, or of the . Zulu in the title story whose . dead father’s spirit has begun j to control his life, bringing , great unhappiness, that man’s , search for his own identity ■ is shared by all races. Like ; all good stories these, with , their subtle implications of , man’s preoccupation with his own affairs, leave the reader , thinking. The Day We Got Drank On I Cake. By William Trevor. ; Bodley Head. 208 pp. This is the first book of short stories by novelist William Trevor. Each of the 12 , stories begins with a situa- , tion which suddenly develops ■ in an unexpected way after the first few paragraphs. All , the characters have one thing in common—an apparent ordinariness in their seemingly mundane lives—but each is in some way out of step with the rest of the world. The author sees with great perception the gulf between the meaningless formalities of what is said and what lies beneath—what is really meant. With the impartiality of a surgeon he probes beneath the world’s view of the bored driving instructor giving Miss Hobish her 241st lesson, the school teacher unwittingly piling up resentment in the heart of one of her young pupils, the parents advertising for a baby-sitter for a child whose bedroom must never be entered. In doing so he takes apart the facade they have so carefully presented to the world. A quiet horror per- ' vades some of the stories, : particularly "In At the Birth” and the final story, “Miss 1 Smith.” But there are mom--1 ents of ironical humour in “The Penthouse Apartment" ■ and “The General’s Day,” t although even in these there is a disquieting quality that may make the reader regard ’ his neighbours with a specu- • lative eye. The title' story, ‘•The Day We Got Drank On > Cake,” tells of a broken roi mance, with Mike telephoning > his giri friend, Lucy, throughI out the day as he moves from t his office to a pub, to a cafe I and, finally, to a noisy party, t accompanied all the time by » three friends who persist- . ently intrude their problems ; into his own. His final tele- ’ phone call to the patiently- ’ answering Lucy is at two in i the morning and only then i- does he understand what she s has shrunk from telling him 1 all day. The author has a moved with facility into his 1 new medium and handles the k smaller canvas with skill.