Puncturing pretensions

Business ethics

Another story, The School, is a polemic on the fake values of Catholic-led business schools. “How to square heartless, profit-driven capitalism with Jesus and the moneychangers…?” (p.43), Stephen’s narrator asks rhetorically: i.e. how can you have Christian ethics if you’re teaching people to be pitiless capitalists? The answer is that the School just ignores all the many cases of unethical behaviour. It schools its students in ruthlessness: when a benefactor fails, he becomes a non-person, wiped off the web site.

The School also poses the more personal ethical problem of working at a place you don’t agree with. In several stories, a narrator/protagonist who is sceptical of power and pretension smartly punctures others’ hypocrisies. In The School, such a protagonist has to face his own dishonesty. Despite his scorn for religious deceit, to keep his job (this job he despises) he too acts unethically. In another story Epiphany the novelist narrator Gabriel also has to face his own dishonesty. He aspires to break from his pretensions and ‘live’ more authentically. “Reality for you is a sort of dry run for fiction,” his wife Daniela tells him (p.86). Unexpectedly longlisted for the Booker prize, his decision to “live in the moment” is blown away as quickly as a pile of ash. Wordly success buries honesty. Both these, indeed most of the stories, are comic – not laugh-out-loud funny, but bitterly ironic - as well as serious and poignant.

Like The School, Motherland has political content. Set in Barcelona in a possible near future, nationalist riots in a heatwave combine with the loving anxiety of a mother for her son. ‘Motherland’ is both ‘our country’ and a mother’s terrain. Stephen enjoys pinpointing contemporary mores. The callow tourists taking over the country sun-bathe half-naked and take selfies alongside the rioters. His paragraph on the tourists includes sharp observation of young holidaymakers, “their pale skin burnt pink”, of exploitation of immigrant labour and of a middle-aged woman’s surprise at the possessive/submissive behaviour of young men and women – all in 20 lines (p.69). These are dense stories. Read them a second time to pick up the detail: one of the pleasures of a good short story.

Precision

Half the stories, Motherland, Kiss, Ima, Ladies’ Man and Due Diligence are told through a woman’s eyes. Kiss deals with the folly of trying to recover past time. Middle-aged AnneMarie tries to relive her first kiss, but that teenage boyfriend’s turned into a seedy charmer. Ladies’ Man finds a bored mother craving adventure and getting more than she bargained for. In both these and several other stories, disaster seems imminent, but the protagonist survives and even learns from the experience.

The main exception to Stephen’s sardonic, often satirical tone is the painful 348 Grosvenor, the longest story in the book. It deals with mental breakdown and family collapse from a child’s point of view. This precise portrait of emotional cruelty in the home is tough to read, as Marcos, unable to grasp fully what is happening around him, withdraws into his own world.

Writing a good short story is notoriously difficult because you need to create a rounded world in few pages. Maximum precision is required. Stephen loves the power and precision of language. Here’s a random example: a young beggar was “wearing that mournful look, like a character in a Polish art house movie” (p.106); and another:

“She loved the smell of wet cement and plaster and sawdust; the stacks of slates and tiles awaiting their moment, sheets of plasterboard, rolls of scrim, the stream of sparks from an angle grinder, the ringing sound of a trowel splitting a brick.” (p.212)

These are fine stories, with polished prose, humour and sharp dialogue. Stephen’s touch is light, though his themes are often dark, i.e. he’s not just polishing a shiny surface. My favourite is Due Diligence, which features three women in a straightforward and moving story about oppression, art, dignity and death. The close second favourite, Victor, is both a rowdy satire on big business and a calm meditation on death, with a brilliantly rendered and unexpected ending. The twenty-page story includes problems with a teenage daughter, a nervous protagonist, a bullying boss, holding hands with a woman in a hijab. Stephen creates a full and rounded world, as in all 11 stories. The book is a pleasure to read.