Glimpses of failure
Mark Illis
THREE EVENINGS by James Lasdun Secker, f13.99, pp.175 The title story in James Lasdun's second collection of short stories describes three phases of an uneasy relationship. In the first, Jonathan and Katie meet and their friendship takes shape. Although they find each other attractive, no moves are made. She talks, confides and flirts, he listens. On the crucial evening they attend an auction together, Katie buys a beautiful chandelier and, because of an incident, Jonathan becomes aware that she has used him, and that he dislikes her, although he simultane- ously craves her. This realisation is linked to a sense that great things may not after all be waiting to happen in his life.
All but one of the other stories in this collection have a similar shape. (The exception, 'Trumpet Voluntary', is a clever but incongruous satirical piece which seems to be a space-filler.) People • in Lasdun's stories find it difficult to know each other. An academic finds it impossible to merge into the social life of her colleagues, a mother finds herself excluded by her weak son and his self-centred future wife, and when an aimless and lonely young man meets a woman in the same state as him- self, he discovers ultimately that he has caused her anguish. People find it difficult to know each other, but they are brought, ruthlessly, to knowledge of themselves. Each story ends with the main character reaching a new awareness of his or her position in relation to another person, or to life as a whole, receiving what is called in `The Volunteer' a sudden, privileged, inward glimpse'. The glimpse is of failure, and its consequences.
The mother, in 'The Coat', spends empty days, and consoles herself with precious, infrequent pleasures, `small contentments'. The actions of her son and his fiancée force her to see the position her life has manoeu- vred her into, a position in which the future is like 'some vast and empty darkness'. In `Macrobiotic', a very short and particularly effective story, the subject is an apparently healthy relationship between two young people, yet one of them still finds himself feeling'like an outsider.
There is an attention for detail in this writing that is linked to an affection for
inanimate things, such as the chandelier, and a coat. In Lasdun's first collection The Silver Age, a story turned on the fate of a shiny brass bugle. His characters find mate- rial things safer and less complicated than other people, and Lasdun can effectively crystallise a troubled relationship in a few sentences in a way reminiscent of Mavis Gallant. But it is hard to be enthusiastic about these stories. The aridity of the char- acters' lives communicates itself to the
writing, so that although each story suc- ceeds as a discreet entity, the collection has a bleakness, a sameness that works against it. The overall effect is one of restraint. Although this is an accomplished collec- tion, it is tempting to apply the adjective `promising' to it, because it never quite sat- isfies, it remains too rigidly on the same sad and wistful note. I finished it wishing that a little more had been attempted, and hoping that it would be next time.
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