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Monday 7 July 2008

Perfection in a small space

Fitzgerald has a famous ability to recreate remote and fantastic worlds in her novels; the declining Italian aristocracy in Innocence, or the perfect solidity of a little German principality in the 1790s in The Blue Flower. One never had the sense that this solidity was achieved through weight of detail, rather by the single, perfectly chosen detail, and in the shorter space of the short story she calls up similarly exotic settings. The most perfect of the stories here, 'Desideratus', is set in the late 17th century, as a poor boy is trapped in a great house and dragged into a mysterious and sinister ritual, perhaps involving metempsychosis or the raising of the dead. The opening is absolutely precise in its period, and utterly evocative, but without any of those physical trappings commonly thought necessary to a historical era:

Jack Digby's mother never gave him anything. Perhaps, as a poor woman, she had nothing to give, or perhaps she was not sure how to divide anything between the nine children. His godmother, Mrs Piercy, the poulterer's wife, did give him something, a keepsake, in the form of a gilt medal. The date on it was September 12th, 1663, which happened to be Jack's birthday, although by the time she gave it him he was 11 years old.

By the second page, the reader is immersed in a completely credible world. It is a matter of choosing the right name. Jack Digby is, unobtrusively, exactly what a boy then and there would be called - and as apt is his occupation, a poulterer, which is not quite from our world, but not quite exotic either. She pitches that at the right level, and everything else follows; one is immediately convinced not just that medals were made of gilt then, but also of the truth of Jack Digby's extraordinary adventure.

The sense of these stories is of a great mind focussing not just on the world, but on the mechanics of fiction. Over and over again, one has the feeling of the last pages of Offshore, that one is being cast adrift from secure moorings and heading for the wild open sea. 'At Hiruharama' is a glorious, Olympian shaggy-dog story, which keeps getting things wrong and heading back on itself to correct its own misapprehensions; it is the sort of anecdote the seraphim might swap among themselves.

More articles from: Philip Hensher | this section

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