Pictures of people talking
Christopher Bray
10 TALL TALES AND TRUE 'This book contains more tales than ten, so the title is a tall tale too. I would Spoil my book by shortening it, spoil the tale if I made it true', writes Alasdair Gray on the contents page of his new collection. He is right on both counts. That title has been ringing in my head for over three weeks now. And with a mere 160 pages of large and heavily leaded type the book is already short enough. You might feel Cheated were Gray's stories not so long on Insight and pathos. Short as it is, this col- lection doesn't leave you feeling short changed.
Gray's remark about spoiling his title by making it true has an Eliotesque air, as if he is more interested in the medium than the message. Nothing could be further from the case. Gray's prose is as unadorned as council-flat brickwork. Writing doesn't come more clear-eyed than this, and always the eyes are looking at the world.
The dustjacket advises the potential pur- chaser that inside he will find 'Social Real- 1501, Sexual Comedy, Science Fiction, Satire'. Indeed he will, and so much more. Within these divisions there are sub- divisions and cross-fertilisations. Where, for instance, would one locate the mordant hilarity of 'Near the Driver' — at 26 pages the longest story in the book. It begins in the defamiliarising mode of science fiction with a confused old lady making her way around a railway station. Later we find out that this is sometime in the future and that Gray is talking politics. The driverless train on which she is travelling smugly announces to its passengers that in eight minutes it will crash into another locomo- tive but that, being computer programmed, it is unable to do anything with this know- ledge. Take that Tory privatisers! We first meet that old lady in much the same way that we meet the protagonist of 'Homeward Bound':
This thirty-year old college lecturer is big, stout, handsome, with the innocent baby face of a man used to being served by women.
One's first impression is of a mock primary school style (childhood jokes always open with a line like 'This bloke was walking down the Old Kent Road'). But Gray writes about these people in the present tense, as if he were showing us pho- tographs of them. And his snapshots are perfectly focused and exposed:
The older navvies thought about death and the youngest about a motorcycle he wanted to buy .. .
Her last lover was an exciting young man whose work and opinions, good looks and quick speech sometimes got him asked onto television shows. He needed a lot of admira- tion and support. She had easily supplied these until she found he was also the lover of her close friend and flat-mate, then she noticed he was an emotional leech who had stopped her investigating Chaucer's debt to Langland for over a month.
They sound flat, just so much deadpan realism, an affront to the commonplace that it is narrative's duty to show and not tell. And yet it is their very flatness that is telling. Aside from that throwaway gag about Chaucer, Clement Greenberg would have loved this stuff.
Not much happens in any of these stories. Hitchcock once carped that most movies were just pictures of people talking. So are Gray's stories, but they don't suffer for it. 'You' is so threadbare it reads more like a set of notes than it does a finished work. But to be this pared down the writer has to start out with an awful lot of material:
He does not try to touch on his way to the car or inside it, and stays in his seat on arriv- ing. Not inviting himself in, he sits with hand on wheel smiling sideways. Think of saying thank you, good night, but instead ask him in. The loving is surprisingly good.
Compression and precision like that take time and effort.
With the exception of that 'surprisingly good' interlude, there is very little love detailed in these pages. Uplifting these tales :ire not. But Gray's dealings with dull- ness are exquisite. The woman in 'Are You a Lesbian?' sneaks off to the pub for a quiet read away from the tinderbox of family life only to be assaulted with the story's eponymous question. The best for which any of his characters can hope is that sadness might dissipate into boredom. Being with this man, the narrator of 'You' suddenly notices at one point, 'is a strain when not loving'. Stories and characters like these ought to make you downcast, and they would, were it not for the pithy inten- sity with which Gray sketches things in. As one closes the book one concludes once more that life is bloody awful. Whether they are tall or true, Alasdair Gray's tales make living it a little easier,
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