Short Stories

These two books represent strikingly different responses to the events of September 11; indeed in some respects they encompass radically divergent human reactions to tragedy of any sort. The Worlds in Collision collection is mostly cool, analytic and carefully reasoned; it contains a pooling of ideas from many different sources, an academic symposium in print. John Carroll’s book is highly personal, rhetorical and passionately grim. He calls it ‘a meditation’, but the tone is not one of quiet reflection, but of prophetic jeremiad. Ken Booth and Tim Dunne want to help us cope with an urgent political problem; Carroll wants to indict a spiritual disease and issue a call for cultural reform. The stock-in-trade of most of the contributors to Worlds in Collision is argument; for Carroll it is primarily metaphor.

Garry Disher is at it again: following the Personal Best short story collections (1 and 2) with this one, Below the Waterline. Broadly speaking, he’s attempting to highlight in this one authors who have come to prominence since the 1980s. Again, he allows the chosen authors to pick a favourite short story, and to include a sort of postscript that explains why it’s a favourite.

This attractive collection of short pieces – mostly fiction – reminded me of the old music-hall adage: start with a bang and leave the best acts till the end. Robert Drewe’s selection certainly begins with a bang. John Updike’s ‘The City’ is the story of a man who arrives in a unnamed city, and sees no more of it than an anonymous hotel room and the hospital where he has his appendix removed. By the end of this cunningly crafted fable, we realise that the city’s fascination for Carson, the central character, is directly related to its being unknown, unseen and as much a cipher (and perhaps a menace too) as it was when he arrived, decidedly queasy from the airline’s freeze-dried peanuts – or so he thought at the time.