Book review: Ox-Tales: Air, Earth, Fire and Water

Published on Thursday 9 July 2009 15:24

Ox-Tales: Air, Earth, Fire & Water by various authors Profile Books, 208pp & 160pp, £5 each Reviews by ALLAN MASSIE

OX-TALES IS AN OXFAM PROMOtion, four little books of short stories or excerpts from work in progress, to be sold in Oxfam shops. Thirty-eight writers, most of them eminent, all reasonably well-known, have contributed. They have given their work free, and all royalties will go to Oxfam. This is so admirable that one would be reluctant to criticise the quality adversely, even if the stories had mostly been retrieved from the bottom drawer or the wastepaper basket. Fortunately, but not surprisingly, this isn't the case. The authors have played fair and given Oxfam good work. So it's a wholly admirable enterprise and readers should be encouraged to go to their nearest Oxfam shop and stock up. The four elegant little books would make ideal company for a holiday.

It would be absurd to try to review this number of stories by different authors in a short notice: it could end up as a list of names. So instead here's a general observation, followed by a note on one story from each book. That story is not necessarily the best – in itself a ridiculous thing to offer – merely one which especially appealed to me.

There are essentially two types of short story, though the two overlap. The first is the anecdote, the kind of story which you could recount yourself over the dinner-table, not as clearly as it was written, but well enough for it still to make its point, especially if it is an anecdote with a twist in the tail. Guy de Maupassant and Somerset Maugham were masters of this sort of tale.

The other kind is more a mood piece. There is usually a narrative, but much of the action is internal, one character perhaps shifting his understanding of his relationship to another. The success of this kind of story depends entirely on how it is done. Nobody wrote stories like this better than Chekhov, few among contemporary writers better than William Trevor and Francis King (neither represented here.)

The anecdote is rather out of fashion and most of the stories in Ox-Tales are of the second type.

Air has good stories by A L Kennedy and Louise Welsh, but the gem, not surprisingly, is a short one by Beryl Bainbridge about a boy who hears news dating from the 1930s on his grandmother's crackly old wireless. It is rich in the throwaway revealing lines characteristic of her wholly original talent. The grandmother is "pretty old, bad at climbing stairs and always mislaying her teeth. She also talked a lot about God, who had mostly let her down." The boy's religious teacher tells him that "inside lies the real truth trying to break through". His mother's response is to shout that "it was bloody ridiculous that her hard-earned earnings were being taxed to provide a livelihood for a mad woman". Every sentence in the story is a joy, new-minted.

Earth offers among others stories by Ian Rankin and Kate Atkinson. Rankin's is very short. It is one he wrote for the Hay-on-Wye festival where he was asked to provide a story of 200 words. He didn't quite manage it; there are 220 words in the one printed here. But they are very neat and well-chosen words. Yet the one I liked best in this volume is Hanif Kureishi's tale of a middle-aged narrator encountering his dead father in a pub.

In Fire we have characteristically good stories from Ali Smith and Sebastian Faulks, but the plum is a chapter from an unpublished novel by the American writer Lionel Shriver. She describes it as "a stand-alone story", and this tale of an encounter 20 years on between two school-fellows, one of them once a "golden boy", does just that, stands alone perfectly complete and satisfying.

Water is perhaps the best of the four volumes. A good story about movie-making from William Boyd, and a strange disturbing one about a modern Charon ferrying the dead across the Styx to the underworld by the Irish novelist David Park. But, for me, the jewel in this lot is Zoe Heller's (insert left) story about a teenage girl who finds a dying dog on a holiday beach and tries to save its life, this leading to what is called an "inappropriate" sexual encounter. The story is beautifully written and beautifully balanced. Not surprising; there are few writers today as talented as Heller.

Each book opens with charming verses by Vikram Seth, and the collections deserve to be so successful that one trusts Oxfam will make this an annual event. Meanwhile, editors Mark Ellingham and Peter Florence, are to be congratulated for their vision and judgment.