Chris Power’s insightful and intellectually nimble column A Brief Survey of the Short Story has appeared on the Guardian website since 2007. To produce one’s own short story collection, after a decade spent in critical engagement with writers such as Vladimir Nabokov, Angela Carter, John Cheever and Elizabeth Taylor is a brave and potentially exposing move. Having examined in forensic detail the strengths and weaknesses, the foibles and failures and moments of genius of so many practitioners of the short form, what happens when you turn your hand to it yourself?
The 10 stories that make up Mothers resist superficial analysis in a way that is interesting in itself. Power is an extraordinarily unshowy craftsman, so that discussing the writing itself feels like trying to focus on the glass of a window, rather than the view beyond. This is partly a function of the transparency of the prose, which so lacks ornament as to almost feel bald in places, and partly to do with the disposition of his narrators, all of whom share a kind of emotional reserve that is close to affectlessness. The risk in this kind of writing is that it leaves the reader unmoved; the reward is that it can more closely mirror daily life, which plays out without a string section or a set of filters to indicate or intensify the mood.
The title of the collection comes from the three stories that open, close and form the heart of the book: “Summer 1976”, “Innsbruck” and “Eva”. All concern the same woman, Eva, glimpsed at different stages of a life deeply marked by her relationship with her own mother. When, in the final story, she becomes a mother herself, we are left to speculate about the subsequent effects on her own daughter, and the manner in which loss and damage are often handed down the generations. This is by no means new material for writers of fiction, but what Power does with it is subtly different, for so much is left unsaid that the result is a deliberately frustrating gap in interpretation. Deliberate because again, this is like life, in which our knowledge of other people – even our mothers – is only ever partial. Power’s insistence that the reader occupies a position of discomfiting uncertainty about cause and effect in Eva’s life is risky, but is absolutely true to the lived experience he is trying to recreate.
Mothers is internationalist in outlook, with stories set in Sweden, Greece, France, the US, Mexico and Spain and a cast of characters who for the most part move with interest and openness through the world in search of work, or love, or something they can’t define. This gives the collection a flavour that might have been less noticeable five years ago, but in today’s political climate feels eloquent.
The stories’ philosophical tenor frequently recalls Sartre’s Nausea and Camus’s The Outsider: alienation, absurdity, freedom and the search for meaning run through many of the narratives here. Another theme is the way in which people often fail to connect, hampered by the gulf between the inner worlds they inhabit. In “The Crossing” a new couple, Ann and Jim, go walking on Exmoor, where enforced closeness combined with revealing moments of physical vulnerability cause the early impressions they have formed of one another to disintegrate. The way Ann tries to stifle her irritation and her complex ambivalence about sleeping with Jim is beautifully captured. In both “Above the Wedding” and “Innsbruck” a sexual encounter is embarked on but then halted by one partner, the physical reality of bodies meeting utterly out of step with the kind of connection they had had in mind. In “Run” it is Englishman David’s obsession with the second world war that ruins a holiday in Sweden, his girlfriend Gunilla, as enigmatic a character as Eva, not just withdrawing from the reality he wants her to share in, but staging an escape.
In an essay for the Guardian on James Salter, Power wrote that the short story “prioritises the extraordinary moment above the changes over time found in novels”. Each story in Mothers does that brilliantly; but across the Eva triptych Power is undeniably concerned with the passage of time. Mothers is a uniquely unsettling and subtle debut collection; one wonders if a longer work might also be on the cards.
• Melissa Harrison’s third novel, All Among the Barley, will be published by Bloomsbury in August. Mothers by Chris Power (Faber, £10). To order a copy for £8.50, go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.
