The Wonderlands

Chatto amp; Windus

Pages: 434

Rs 799

One of my favourite teachers in school was a crotchety man with a foul temper and a surprisingly warm sense of humour. Given the combination,it was often difficult to tell how much of the crazed shouting was in jest. On one occasion,while taking us through Hamlet,Mr Kennedy announced,at somewhere near the top of his voice,that we were not,under any circumstances,to try and write anything original about Shakespeare. Whole buildings arent big enough, he said,to hold all thats been written about Shakespeare. So dont imagine youll be able to come up with any new takes on the subject!

The injunction came back to me as I was reading New Selected Stories,a compilation of Alice Munros fiction extracted from her last five books. What,after all,has not been said of Munros stories? That she is a fantastic writer check but moreover that shes a writers writer,that she has been,in Margaret Atwoods words,elevated to literary sainthood. That her stories return to the same themes,over and over check but also that with each revisiting,these big,simple ideas God,sex,love; faithful- and faithless-ness are prised open and polished till they glow with life. And,of course,that Munro is underrated,under-known check and check again but further,that this underrating is a product of a suspicious consensus over the novel as a more worthwhile literary endeavour,and of the belittling of pure storytelling for,in Jonathan Franzens words,tremblingly earnest,faux-literary stuff.

Maybe it was this ubiquity of praise that prompted Chatto amp; Windus to forgo an introduction to this handsomely produced selection. Thats a pity: good introductions only enhance the pleasure of anthologies,and there would have been no harm in explaining why these 15 stories were chosen; or even,once again,how Munro is a marvellous writer.

Among the most powerful of these stories is Dimensions,which tells of Dorees life after her husband Lloyd murders their three children. But the point,the force of what Franzen calls Munros almost pathological empathy,is not in the horrific slaughter,is not in the semi-catatonic breakdown,is not even in Dorees healing; or not,at any rate,in healing as it might have been handled by a lesser writer. Doree finds solace through Lloyd,who she visits in an institution for the criminally insane.

Or take Hateship,Friendship,Courtship,Loveship,Marriage,in which Munro builds suspense with Hitchcockian economy as the dowdily efficient Johanna dashes halfway across the country in pursuit of a man who has no idea she means to marry him. How do things work out for Johanna or,for that matter,for the habitually adulterous husband,in The Bear Came Over the Mountain,who finds his wife who has got Alzheimers in love with a fellow patient; or for the two nervous women in My Mothers Dream and The View from Castle Rock,both manically dependent on the affections of other peoples children?

In the end,these are gentle,exquisitely plotted examinations of life with a mercifully small l. There are no big theories here,no linguistic fireworks,just sentence after meticulously crafted sentence. Here,for example,is the beginning of an adolescent love affair: His talk was like a curtain of easy rain between me and the trees,the light and shadows on the road,the clear-running creek,the butterflies,and all that part of myself that would have paid attention to these things if I had been alone.

Almost imperceptibly,the sentences accumulate into stories,stories of such emotional depth that you may find yourself taking your eyes off the page in tears and not quite knowing why.