Short Stories

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31802, 5 October 1968, Page 4

Short Stories

The Love Object By Edna O’Brien. Jonathan Cape. 189 pp. The title-story in this book of short stories is so completely devoted to amatory details of a brief liaison between an elderly married sensualist and a passionhungry divorcee that the reader expects that this familiar feature of Miss O’Brien's literary work is likely to continue. But here he is wrong. Through the rest of the collection there runs a vein of pathos and human understanding, and some memorably good writing. “The Rug” and “Irish Revel” have the same country background—the first being a moving account of what appears to be an unexpected gift, much treasured by the recipient but proving to have been sent to her by mistake; the second a tragi-comic picture of a young girl, dressed up to go to a public-house dance, who finds that she is treated by her hostess as an unpaid servant, and determinedly pursued by a disagreeable and drunken male guest The thread of disillusionment and disappointment continues in “Cords,” which shows the attempt at reunion in London of a simple country Irishwoman, and her daughter who has gained some renown as a poet and whose friends—battered and cynical members of an artistic world—regard the mother with puzzled disdain. The family relationship has always been difficult, and the mother abruptly breaks off the visit and goes home. The long end-story “Paradise,” shows the narrator, who is the latest In the long line of a millionaire’s mistresses, as a hopeless fish out of water among a group of idle, shiftless people whose conversation is to her incomprehensible. In her agony of mind she tries to drown herself, but loses not her life but the millionaire’s interest. An unhappy philosophy of life permeates the book, but Edna O’Brien is a writer of distinction. Swans and Turtle*. By Rumer Godden. Macmillan. 218 PP-

In this collection of short stories Rumer Godden has drawn a good deal on personal experiences which she details as a preface to each one of them—a> factor which enhances their interest Perhaps the best of them though

is one in no way connected with her own life. “Fireworks for Elspeth” is the story of a girl of 19 who has the unswerving intention of becoming a nun, and is treated by her family and friends alike as a kind of tragic phenomenon destined to bring sorrow to everyone she loves, and who loves her. This is an exquisite character study. Another conventional episode —this time with a very personal background—is made the subject of “The Little Fishes.” It tells of the miserable start of an English education for two small girls whose parents are in India, and who have been sent home to be brought up as wellbehaved young ladles, bereft of Indian sunshine and their chi-chi accents, and whose uncouthness is the butt both of Authority and their own contemporaries. “To Uncle With Love” is a deliciously funny story, describing the efforts of a little girl, to buy, with an outlay of 3d, an acceptable gift for a favourite bachelor uncle. Happily she swoops on a well-bound book hidden in the 3d tray of a second-hand book shop. It is in fact a fully-illustrated and grossly pornographic work, and almost destroys the poor man’s character posthumously in the eyes of his horrified sisters when discovered in a drawer after his death—until they find the pages of the reading matter still uncut, and the proud inscription from his niece in the fly leaf. Another tale that can be picked out for distinction is “L’Elegance” wbich describes her weekly holiday abroad of a terribly refined and Inhibited spinster, who against all but one of her natural instincts falls for an amused assault on her virtue by a Rabelaisian character who is the chef at her hotel. Nearly all the stories in the collection have already been published in various magazines to wbich the author has made due acknowledgement