In Philip Hensher’s introduction to his recent two-volume Penguin Book of the British Short Story, he wrote of his determination to “not include famous writers on the basis of achievement that, in reality, lay elsewhere”. In the same spirit, although Hensher is capable of very good, sometimes brilliant writing, I can’t say much of it is on show in his new collection of short stories.
The frustrating thing about Tales of Persuasion is that most of the stories are overlong, and it is easy to identify the fat that should have been trimmed. Take, for example, “My Dog Ian”, about an affair between an English museum administrator and a visiting Italian professor. It has interesting things to say about hindsight, and the moments that, surprisingly, turn out to be the most important in your life. But a good 15 pages in this almost 50-page story – pages in which a dull Australian theology professor and his wife hold forth about the vagaries of academic progression and the size of milk cartons – will test the patience of many readers.
Similarly, “The Whitsun Snoggings” takes 30 pages to do the work of 15, not least because of Hensher’s decision to include phatic conversations that would send you running to the quiet carriage:
The man had his bag, a brown sort of satchel on one of their seats, but he had a kind face, and apologised as he got up and put his satchel on the luggage rack. “Don’t let me forget that,” he said. “I’m always getting off trains and forgetting things I’ve put in the rack.”
“Oh, I’m just the same,” Mum said, as they all sat down. “I’ve lost count of the number of umbrellas I’ve left on the train, just like that, putting them up on the luggage rack and then forgetting them when I get off.”
“I don’t know what the trick is, to remember what you’ve put up there,” the man said.
“I heard,” Mum said, smiling and settling, “that it helps if you just count how many things you put up there – one, two, coat, umbrella, three, like that. I don’t know. Where are you getting off?”
“Me – oh, London,” the man said.
This exchange, so banal even Karl Ove Knausgaard would cut it, defies the accepted wisdom that in a short story every word needs to count. As I read on, it became emblematic to me of a book in which too many stories outstay their welcome.
“A Change in the Weather” is shorter, and better. It draws on Hensher’s job in the early 90s as a parliamentary clerk (as did his second novel, Kitchen Venom, and my own favourite among his stories, “Work”, from his 1999 collection The Bedroom of the Mister’s Wife). The story is an atmospheric account of an unusual first day at work that coincides with an IRA mortar attack on Downing Street, and includes the memorable image of snow falling on an evacuated Whitehall. The overall effect is marred only by a lack of editorial care. As the main character, George, looks around his new offices he notes the windows are “hung with dirty grey net curtains, too long for the space and falling to a pile on the windowsill”. Three pages later, we find George once again examining the net curtains: “They did not hang loose”, we are told, “but fell to a gathering pile on the windowsill”.
A similar inattentiveness shows here and there in the language, which in Hensher’s case is usually reliably fluent. At one point in “The Midsummer Snowball”, an enjoyably nasty story of childhood snobbery that disperses its energy in an unnecessary epilogue, a group of school kids flouts the convention of school dinners in favour of packed lunches. “The opening of the lunch boxes,” Hensher writes, “had drawn the boys from the next table, who were craning to see this elegant independence, this choice to picnic like shaded gentry.” The simile fails because its register appears to belong to an older, archer world than the one inhabited by Hensher’s subjects. In contrast, the protagonist of the next story, “In Time of War”, witnesses a sunset that “held his attention, like pornography”. For Fred, the ringleader of a debauched Soho posse and a so-called “dizzy tart”, holidaying solo in India, this is perfect: not just funny and arresting, but most importantly expressive of character. It snaps him into focus with the economy that short stories thrive on.
Other highlights include “Under the Canopy”, where a neglectful carer drags her ill charge around Clapham in pursuit of a pair of shoes, and “A Lemon Tree”, in which a senile woman mistakes her nursing home for a glamorous spa. This closing story, just six pages long, teaches the lesson of brevity that Rudyard Kipling memorably expressed: “A tale from which the pieces have been raked out is like a fire that has been poked”. Most of these stories need a great deal of poking.
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