The Atmospheric Railway

This is a wonderfully bittersweet selection of works by one of the modern masters of the short story.

Shena Mackay is always entertaining, even as she conveys the humour and poignancy of relationships beset by the ravages of time and family life, as well as hard-earned compassion for her characters.

The thirteen new stories that open this volume give us a fresh introduction to her concerns. These often feature women rather put-upon by life, like Linda Carpenter in ‘The Lower Loxley Effect’, who has ‘murder in her heart’ – for a trespassing tomcat – and senses ‘life had shrunk, while she herself had not’. Or Louisa in ‘Swansong’ who decides to look up an old boyfriend, only to find him running a charity shop and much changed for the worse; ‘she hid her burning face in a box of broken jewellery’.

But such women can also strike back disconcertingly, as in ‘Nanny’, when a scorned ex-lover turns up at a bookshop talk given by a pompous male writer. Mackay is indeed deliciously funny on the foibles and vanities of authors. Her most celebrated portrayal of these is in ‘Death by Art Deco’, featuring popular novelist Andrea Heysham, whose casual selection of a story competition winner, and employment of her as an ‘amenuensis-cum-PA’, leads to comically upsetting consequences.

The title story is one of the longest and most emotionally complex, its central relationship being not between discontented spouses or disappointed lovers but an ageing brother and sister who have been researching their family history. The subtlety of this emerges in the course of the brother’s train journey home, when an incident involving a misbehaving toddler throws family issues into a new light. By contrast, the characters in ‘A Pair of Spoons’ are lesbian antique dealers whose relationship comes under stress when one of them discovers the other has kept secret a house full of treasures, leaving her ‘tear-stained and tense as a whippet, poised on the edge of their marriage’.

Mackay’s sympathetic portrait of same-sex relationships, as in ‘Pink Cigarettes’ and ‘Trouser Ladies’, also provides the dynamic of ‘All the Pubs in Soho’. In this deftly evoked mid-1950s Kent village, a child is befriended by gay artists, only for them to be driven away by the violence of locals. But perhaps Mackay’s most memorable vignette of illicit love is in the doctor-patient affair of ‘Evening Surgery’. This is a beautifully observed account of all-too-human feelings, leading to the discovery of ‘the condemned pair’ by the busybody receptionist, who finds them ‘frozen together as in a freak snow-storm’.

Readers who may only know Shena Mackay’s novels should sample these delightful stories, thirty-six spread over more than four hundred pages, for their special insights into the Human Comedy. Even more than that, she is the poetic laureate of what one story calls ‘the Gothic of everyday failure’.