In the prelude to Kirsty Gunn’s new collection of stories a man and a woman, former lovers now in middle age, meet at a bar. They drink tequila, flirt, and talk late into the night about her forthcoming book, to be called, as it happens, Infidelities. “No one reads short stories, anyway,” the man points out. “No one thinks there’s enough going on.”
The undercurrents and nuances in this brief, intense piece serve as a tantalising amuse bouche. The book itself is a network of roads not taken, meandered through, or raced along, the stories grouped in sections: “Going Out”, “Staying Out” and “Never Coming Home”.
Gunn has always been a notably original writer: her last work, the highly acclaimed The Big Music, explored the fearsome, lamenting music of the Great Highland bagpipe. Though Scotland has been her home for many years, Gunn is originally from New Zealand. Outside the major cities, both countries offer vast open spaces, isolation, wildness, possibility. These landscapes – neatly contrasted in a story with a statue of Robert Burns at its centre – feature most prominently, with only two stories straying into different backdrops: the pagan woods of Oxfordshire and a London night at the height of summer.
Gunn is as concerned with form and structure as she is with plot or character. Her writing is extraordinarily controlled, rich, and melodic, even as her protagonists dither and waver. Women and men trapped in circumstances, usually a commitment they long to escape, reach for words like “inevitable”, “devastating”, “despair”; they are perpetually on the brink of disaster or marvel.
Nature is used to reinforce a feeling, to turn towards or away from a course of action. In “A Story She Might Tell Herself” a wife debased by her bullying husband finds the psychological escape route she is seeking with the mysterious arrival of a Buddhist monk in their small English village. The impulsive night-time pilgrimage she later makes through a nearby forest in search of this calm, resolute figure leads to resolution and an approximation of peace. In “Foxes”, a young woman, about to enter the perfect matrimonial set-up, diverts to a different path following a chance encounter in a wood – ‘becoming instead like a fox myself, slipping out of everything that was known and planned and calculated, disappearing into leaves and trees.”
“The Wolf on the Road” sees a married woman driving to a rendezvous with a stranger, narrowly swerving to avoid an injured animal on a deserted road. As a result of this near-miss, an adulterous affair will either be averted or plunged into. There is a strong affinity here with the joyous, dark subversion evident in novels such as David Garnett’s Lady into Fox or Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes.
Gunn does not shy away from depicting ugly, painful loss. A quartet makes up “Highland Stories”: in one, a boy, the sole, uncomforted witness of his father’s suicide, is moved to re‑enact it through violence. “Tangi” loosely means to grieve or to mourn, deriving from the Maori tangihanga, the ceremony for the dead. A remote part of New Zealand is the setting for the long summer breaks a child spends with her beloved grandmother. Gradually she learns that her Nanni’s frowned-upon friendship with a Maori woman encompasses a decades-long history of ostracism, denial and family shame.
This matryoshka effect – of layers of a story revealed like a set of Russian nesting dolls, placed one inside the other – is most strikingly in play in two standout pieces. “A Scenario” is a tour-de force account of a long-ago seduction which, through its provocative retelling, establishes a new, exciting liaison. In the book’s final piece, “Infidelity”, Gunn comes full circle, echoing the book’s opening taster as she manipulates meaning, context and language. A creative writing student aims to construct a narrative around a significant incident that occurred the morning after her wedding, years before. The story is built up, revised and edited through different, plausible versions until the bare, mundane yet somehow incredible truth is uncovered: “As though everything else was secondhand … her life, everything created, like a story, to be thought through and interrogated and organised in advance, and intuited or imagined or already foreseen …”
In a triumphant finale, Gunn has given us nothing less than a masterclass in the art of fiction.
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