An eccentric but spirited woman called Dolly starts a pirate radio station, broadcast from her own caravan. Listeners send her things, including cuttlefish for her budgie:
‘I’m only sending this ironically’, one of them had written. Dolly was flattered; she knew that students do everything ironically these days; watch kids’ TV, eat Pot Noodles.
In the title story:
Cousin Beryl lived in an area of Dulwich transformed from the quiet suburb of her childhood into a place of cookware shops, cafés, organic butchers, with a number of junk and antiques shops, where the new, affluent population could buy the amusing old furniture and kitchenware which had belonged to the previous owners of their houses, and put it back.
About a quarter of The Atmospheric Railway consists of 13 new short stories. These reveal Mackay’s gifts to be at their peak. One, called ‘Windfalls’, contains in its ten pages as much heartache, comic absurdity and observational genius as a full-length film by Mike Leigh. I was smiling at this simple story, about a recently widowed man collecting his grandchildren from school while their parents are at work, when a choking sob rose unbidden from my throat. Shena Mackay can do this to a reader. You think you’re reading a light farce about a bossy medical receptionist, then abruptly she turns the story into a contemporary version of Brief Encounter and fat tears are plopping onto the page.
A couple of cavils. I didn’t like the surrealist whimsy with which some of the new stories are concluded. When you are as good at depicting real life as this writer, fantasy is extraneous. And it seems perverse of the publisher to commence with the new material but then, without any textual break, segue into her oldest stories, so that the more recent appear towards the book’s end: surely it would have made more sense to give the dates and collections from which the stories are taken and print the whole either chronologically or in reverse, not a bit of both. Nevertheless, The Atmospheric Railway deserves a fanfare. Shena Mackay is nothing short of a national treasure.
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