ENTER THE TALES OF SHENA Mackay, where time and memory run amok, and you find yourself instantly seduced. Mackay, who kicked off at the age of 16 by winning a poetry competition, almost at once forsook the stanzas and turned prosaic, sticking wit
h novels and novellas (and the occasional book of highly acclaimed short stories) ever since.
To truly appreciate the jack-in-the-box spontaneity (and the poetry) of her prose, you have to read "Dust Falls on Eugene Schlumburger" followed by "Toddlers on the Run", published together 44 years ago by Deutsch, before Mackay was out of her teens.
To catch the same vibe, the feeling of free-association, of something rampant, you have to resort to her slimmer volumes of almost always striking short stories.
Her weightier novels, by way of comparison, opt for shapeliness and proportion, a sense of order throughout their depths, and the hint of a blueprint beneath the glistening narrative surface. Her stories (the best of them), by contrast, glow like fireflies, darting sprites, who misbehave and (again with the best of them) come to be treasured.
When writing her novels and her novellas Mackay is an architect. In the stories she is a sorceress, leery eyed, luring you in with a beckoning fingernail dipped in brimstone. Incandescent, wrapped in blue touch-paper, soaked in petroleum, the stories are gloriously volatile, sometimes uplifting. Now and again the oomph escapes, they flop, they deflate, they fail to ignite.
This happens twice in her chunky New and Selected Stories, named after its opening tale, "The Atmospheric Railway". It starts off grey, at the speed of a railway carriage carrying nondescript Neville back from Dulwich, where he has been to meet cousin Beryl, then home to Faith, his reliable wife; home towards retirement in quiet Hampshire. Then the tale the turns dully ochre with hints of nostalgia, speeding up, before slowing down to meet its buffers, an anti-climax.
Neville, beautifully inhabited with his quirks and reminiscences, is at odds with the modern world. He comes from Mackay's central casting – of characters marginalised, or subsumed by the humdrum business of routine existence, their depths unsuspected, their plights unspoken.
The story is never less than engaging, but overburdened, its train of diversions – into the pasts of Neville and Beryl – seeming at times to become derailed – which is true to life but less true to art.
This sense of deflation occurs again in "That Innocent Bird", an amused pastiche of Treasure Island, blowing the whistle – thanks to Polly – on Long John Silver's shady retirement as a pub landlord, Jock MacSiller. Jock is a family man on the run "until he thinks it safe to return to his native England", and Polly is really "Cap'n Flint, the pirate parrot" a slice of hokum on a perch.
Again, the ending feels like a story struggling to quit on a plausible note.
The test is simple: do you care – about the characters, or what happens? Would they make you postpone your night out, or send for a takeaway just to stay riveted to the page? Mackay at her finest can pull this trick, can make you gobble a book of stories as if they were sweets. Some great inclusions from former collections enhance this compendium: "The Curtain with the Knot in It", "Till the Cows Come Home" with its writer's voice, secreted, "sprinkling brand names", simultaneously deriding "all this Hovis-hued nostalgia", and from her collection Babies in Rhinestones the marvellous "Dreams of Dead Women's Handbags", with its heroine junked on a "staple diet of vodka and asparagus", living alone "more entertained than entertaining".
Such powers of astute observation, infused with compassion, throw up new gems. Tackle "Jumbo Takes a Bath", two pages of comi-tragic pathos, or tune your heat-seeking sense of humour to "Radio Gannet" and there you'll find classic Mackay, wacky graduates of misfortune and glittery longing.
Mackay also conjures up some marvellous men, as with the widower in "Windfalls", and paints treacly tales that harbour cautionary bite. Check out the fate of Louisa in "Swansong", who finds the past is best avoided, or relish the pain of Campbell Forsythe, writer and critic, whose due comeuppance in fun-curdled "Nanny" is delicious, proving Mackay has lost none of her sorcery, none of her bright, intelligent wit.
