Moments of clarity

By now, Alice Munro has established a territory as her own so completely, you wonder that the Canadian Tourist Board doesn’t run bus tours there.

Perhaps they do, even though it presents an appearance more characteristic than inviting. To think of her world is to think of lonely houses at the edge of bleak, small towns; of unsatisfied backrooms looking over muddy fields; of suburbs, making do; of institutions imposed on half-made landscapes, and human disappointment reflected in the world about her characters.

It is classic short-story territory, and over the years Munro has carved a substantial reputation without venturing very far from what she does best; the classic short story of disappointment and epiphany, in the landscape she knows and understands. She now says she has written only one novel, as long ago as 1971, but one exercise in interlinking stories in a volume, The Beggar Maid, convinced the Booker judges in 1980 that here was a new sort of novel. (She won the International Booker Prize, for an entire oeuvre, earlier this year). In reality, she is an expert in the shorter form and is wise not to stray.

This collection is (mostly) as strong and vivid as ever. A woman is bound by a sense of duty to her insane and incarcerated husband, the murderer of her children, until one day a random accident on her journey to visit him seems to free her from obligation. We are free to conclude, as she bends over a stranger lying in the ditch, that what fulfils her nature is a Magdalen-like need to serve, and it hardly matters who benefits from her charity. In another story, the memory of her collapsed marriage in early life returns to the much-remarried wife, many years later, in the form of the daughter of her first husband’s mistress.