Book review: 365 Stories by James Robertson
365 STORIES
JAMES ROBERTSON
Penguin, 416pp, £12.99
His previous novels have addressed the Lockerbie Disaster, in terms of the emotional wreckage as much as the elusive truth; the history of Scotland from the post-war period to the verge of a referendum; a minister wrestling with faith and the supernatural (in the fine tradition of Lockhart, Hogg, Stevenson and Buchan); the legacy of Scotland’s involvement with the slave trade and that perennial fixation, the divided self. This collection of stories is every bit the equal of the novels, in execution and enterprise. In 2013, Robertson set himself the challenge of writing a story every day of that year, each of which would be precisely 365 words long. The result is an anthology of possibility about what the short form can do.
There are precedents for such an undertaking. Anthropology by Dan Rhodes features 101 stories of 101 words. Robert Shearman is currently completing a series of 100 stories, each of which ends with a choice for the reader about which story to read next, with only one path which will touch on each story once and only once. Raymond Queneau’s masterly Exercises In Style is the same “story” told in 99 different ways. The idea of unlocking creativity by deliberate constraint, a technique pioneered in the 20th century by the French Oulipo Group, of whom Queneau was a member, clearly appeals to Robertson. So it is a pleasure to get to 7 May, and the story “Rennie Mackay” – a very humorous fake obituary of a Scottish surrealist – and then turn to 8 May, with an official version of the story constructed using the Oulipo N+7 stratagem: each noun is replaced with one seventh ahead in a dictionary of the writer’s choosing. So the sentence “Having taken drawing lessons from an early age, Mackay’s first employment was as a designer of patterns for linoleum in a Kirkcaldy factory” is transmogrified into “Having taken drawing levities from an early agony, Mackay’s first enclosure was as a despot of pawns for liquid in a Kirkcaldy failure”.
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Hide AdThere are stories in almost every genre: adaptations of traditional ballads; new folk tales about the eejit Jack who is sometimes wiser than he lets on; pieces of empathetic social observation; waspish satires on officialese in all its forms; an undertow of elegiac pieces about watching someone you care about get older, counterpointed with The Adventures Of Death (Robertson begins with his version of “The Appointment in Samarra”, which follows on from John O’Hara’s, Somerset Maugham’s, Idries Shah’s and Fudail ibn Ayan’s versions); miniature essays; Aesopian fables; flights of fancy (why did Alex Salmond unleash a lion onto Centre Court after Andy Murray won Wimbledon?); acute studies of relationships in crisis; reminiscences of epiphanies while travelling; science fiction; historical fiction (especially concerning the Enlightenment and Walter Scott); transpositions; anecdotes; saint’s lives and jokes.
That the book was being written, as it were, in real time means there are some wry smiles to be had. Sometimes they may be at the expense of Tony Blair’s Damascene conversion to being a bringer of peace; sometimes it might be a sardonic take on that year’s Saltire Awards. A scrap of news becomes a spark of inspiration, an overhead remark might trump a Major Political Event. Significant dates – 1 April, Christmas, Guy Fawkes’ Night, 18 September – have stories appropriate to their import. Robertson’s curiosity about religion is evident throughout. In “Waiting”, the story for 13 October, the testy angst seems almost feverish. It’s odd that Robertson commemorates various dates, but not Easter or Good Friday. The beginning and end of the book deal with the nature of story-telling itself, and why humans are uniquely driven by the need to create narratives. Cats, dogs and birds don’t tell stories about themselves, but we co-opt them into stories insistently.
I had worried that 365 Stories would be like gorging on canapés; that to read quickly, rather than once a day online, might sate the appetite and leave me full but unfulfilled. The book doesn’t read like that. It is such a cornucopia of conceits that you can’t resist leaving a story parodying the government to read a story like the Brothers Grimm to a story drawing on the deep wells of Scottish culture to a moment of contemporary satire. These are, in a way, five finger exercises. But such a demand and determination can create a Chopin.