Fear in a handful of pages
Anita Brookner
SUGAR AND OTHER STORIES by A. S. Byatt
Chatto & Windus, £10.95
The circumscribed life of the writer comes through with alarming strength in this collection of stories. A. S. Byatt is of course better known as the author of voluminous and impressive novels, con- structed almost on Victorian lines, which entrap somewhere in their strong north- country narrative drive a fascination with pictures and an ability to describe them in minute but suggestive particulars. Some- where, in the story called 'Sugar', which is in fact a fragment of autobiography to do with her father's death, she mentions, casually, yet with the truth she brings to all her observations, her fear of art. This seems to me more interesting than the fragment which surrounds it, yet 'frag- ment' will hardly do for the rock-like solidity of the memoir, with its intimations of cold, discomfort and Victorian restric- tions, and its bleak attempt to recall without fantasy a family background, a family history.
Indeed, A. S. Byatt's determination to tell the truth, and the honourable discom- fort that this engenders, militate against the setting up and resolution of situations or the transcription of incidents which are the essence of the short story. It is, on the other hand, the setting forth of histories which cannot be truncated that makes a novel. People who express a desire to write
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