Writerly magic

A frock that shocks, a terror-filled red coat and diamonds of seductive power are all promised next week in an alluring late-night series on Radio 3 (produced by Duncan Minshull). Listener, They Wore It gives us five 15-minute essays about clothes. Not a subject I would normally bother with, never being someone noted for my sartorial elegance or originality. But by chance I opened up one of the preview discs and was hooked immediately. The novelist Tracy Chevalier is talking about the impact on her teenage self of Guy de Maupassant’s short story ‘The Necklace’. Chevalier based an entire novel on a pearl necklace so she knows the value of wearing the right beads.

In Maupassant’s story, Matilda, the bored wife of a lowly civil servant, borrows from a rich friend what she believes to be a priceless diamond necklace when she and her dull husband are invited to a town ball. She has a thrilling evening, but by the time she gets home the necklace is no longer round her neck. Naturellement, Matilda is too weak-minded to own up to the loss. Instead she saddles herself and her husband with a decade of debt by buying a hugely expensive replacement.

This being a classic Maupassant story, there’s an ironic twist at the end, deliciously explained by Chevalier. She rereads the story as a mature woman (who’s made enough money from her books to own any number of diamonds), and finds all sorts of other nuances in what is actually only a seven-page unsettler. Maupassant, says Chevalier, conjures up a precise picture of Matilda’s flawed character, and then by writerly magic ensures that we as readers get our own come-uppance by allowing ourselves also to be sucked into believing that a bunch of sparklers (which Maupassant never describes in any detail) can effect a life-enhancing transformation.