Books & Poetry

WB Yeats famously wrote that he mind of man is forced to choose between perfection of the life or of the work. Here in Valerie Martin’s new collection of stories is ample proof of the dangers faced by those creative artists whose pursuit of the willing suspension of disbelief amounts to a pathology as much as an artistic credo. As any camp follower to those in thrall to the muse can attest, excessive devotion to la vie bohème is not without risk and it is the emotional flotsam and jetsam that attends such obsession that is the major theme of Martin’s work.

In the title story a successful if unaccomplished author is haunted by an ex-lover whose work, the author realises with a shock, has always surpassed his own. The dual legacies of both resentment at his lover’s betrayal and of the life’s work that she leaves him fuel a denouement that is both chilling and utterly plausible. In ‘The Bower’, a happily married drama ecturer begins an intense affair with a brilliant student after his consummate performance as Hamlet. Utterly confident of his future success, it is not until years later that she learns of the real tragedy that blighted his talent and ruined his life. In a wonderful fable, ‘The Change’, a menopausal print-maker skirting madness in her obsessive quest for perfection reaches so far into her own psyche that she is forever trapped. Stuck in a puritanical and convincingly provincial ampus in Connecticut, a poet and her lover long for the flamboyant and pagan excesses of Rome in ‘The Open Door’.

Martin’s ear for dialogue is flawless and subtle, and she convincingly captures the yawning cultural chasm between Europe and the United States. As a character observes, ‘Rome is so full of disorder and messiness, all the things Americans are terrified of because they prefer death to life.’ At the heart of these wonderful and engaging stories is the artist’s ache for greatness, for transcendence. Martin’s writing is both unflinching and utterly compelling.