Tricks of the light
Katie Grant
ELEMENTALS by A. S. Byatt Chatto, X12, pp. 232 0 pening this little collection of short stories is like opening a jewellery box. You extricate a brooch which is, as a concept, essentially a workaday object. It is the coloured gem which is attached to the clasp that, in different lights, transforms the mundane into something magical. This is the art of the lapidarist and this is also the art of A. S. Byatt.
In 'Crocodile Tears', the first story of the six, she gives us Patricia Nimmo, a sudden- ly widowed, unremarkable, middle-aged home counties lady. This perfectly ordinary woman in unfortunate but not unusual cir- cumstances is transformed into something extraordinary as Byatt reveals her in her contrasting lights. 'Crocodile Tears' is a tale of warmth and cold, of clarity and obscurity, of the commonplace and the bizarre. It never becomes so fanciful that it loses its sense of the real, yet it is written with a detachment which, despite the detailed, factual descriptions of place and colour, make it as mysterious as a fable or a fairy story.
The following tales — 'Stories of Fire and Ice', as the author calls them — reach a climax of fancy in 'Cold', an unashamed imaginative flight ripe for interpretation by budding literary critics. Then we are slowly brought back to earth until in `Jael' we are, or at least we think we are, listening to the schoolgirl reminiscences of a maker of advertisements. This penultimate story chills the spine even more than imagining the naked rompings of Princess Fiammarosa in the snow. Byatt then adds, as a sort of coda, what she imagines the story to be behind the painting by Velazquez entitled 'The Kitchen Scene with Christ in the House of Martha and Mary'. This is a faultless short story, told in such a matter-of-fact tone that one must read carefully to take in the build-up of detail which makes the final denouement so perfect.
It is part of Byatt's talent that she uses the same formula, the mixing of fact and fancy, for both her novels and her short stories to equal effect. That the short stories, in my opinion, seem more memo- rable is a tribute rather than a criticism. In the spirit of Pascal, when Byatt has time to make her writings shorter, they gain in zest.
She is obsessed by obsession but often needs no more than a dozen or so pages, rather than several hundred, to infect the reader.
Obsession for Byatt is a quest for knowl- edge of some kind. Possession and Angels and Insects are as much living encyclopae- dias as novels and it is not necessarily always to her novels' advantage that they display the sort of intricate familiarity with obscure subjects that is more usually to be found in dusty academic tomes. However, in her short stories the lists — of, for exam- ple, painting techniques in 'A Lamia in the Cevennes' — never overwhelm. Byatt uses her methodological expertise as the warp and her imagination as the weft. The result is a rare balance.
If Byatt does not paint herself, maybe she should, for everything in her world is coloured and textured. Descriptions of both are a vital part of the developing sto- ries. Patricia throws off her confident bright yellow home counties suit and buys a white silk jersey dress of falling pleats, gold slippers, 'a honeycomb cotton robe, in aquamarine', and a 'gold-and-silver striped toothbrush' when she arrives in Nimes, a place of 'warm cream and gold stone' and
`white places where she blinked and saw
water'. Bernard, the painter, wrestles to capture 'recalcitrant blue' and 'amiable, non-natural aquamarine' but ends up cap- turing an enchanted spirit trapped in a snake's body, a 'miraculous black velvet rope'. The ice princess, whose rosy flush gives way to milky paleness 'like white rose petals', is only truly herself when she Is encased in a 'crackling skin of ice' that breaks into `spiderweb-fine veined sheets as she dances. This is a happy book whose stories benefit from being taken out and reread from different angles. Whatever the angle, they glitter. Byatt has done it again.
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