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Perfect prose

Kate Chisholm

Wednesday, 16th July 2008

National Short Story Award (Radio 4)

Wigfall, at 32 the youngest writer on the shortlist, has produced an extraordinary story for someone born in Greenwich, south-east London, and brought up in California in the 1980s, who has never lived in Scotland. ‘The Numbers’ is set some time in the far-distant past on a remote island in the Outer Hebrides. One of the judges remarked that it’s ‘an astonishing feat of historical ventriloquism’, Wigfall creating a heroine, Peigi Nicfionnlaigh, a lonely young woman, so far removed from her in experience and knowledge. Peigi, who has been obsessed with counting numbers — ‘they lend a logic to the world...they can be a comfort’ — since her childhood days at the village school, stumbles across the dark secrets of her island home.

Short stories are probably a bit like chamber music in that you appreciate them more the older you get, when you’ve learnt, hopefully, a bit more patience and willingness to work at what you read. I do enjoy reading them, but they also work brilliantly on radio, taking us back to the aural roots of our literary culture. A short story can be heard and held in the mind as a thing entire and of itself; a pleasing sufficiency of thought. The five stories on the shortlist were first broadcast on Radio Four last week, read by a superb group of actors including Samantha Bond, Geoffrey Palmer and Ron Cook. If you’re quick you can catch them on Listen Again. I listened to all five at once, and was intrigued by the huge range of style and flavour, from an atmospheric tale by Erin Soros about children in Canada climbing up a death-defying surge tank to Jane Gardam’s sharply observed tale from her collection The People of Privilege Hill. She gave us so many characters in just half an hour, from an entirely believable trio of cantankerous retired judges to their eccentric hostess Dulcie and her precocious eight-year-old grandson Herman, whose antics made me laugh out loud.

There were over 600 entries to this year’s prize, whittled down to five by a voting system among the judges that was derived, says Kearney, from the method used by the Prix Goncourt. What we now need, of course, is to revive the custom of a Spectator magazine short-story slot.