The people in Rose Tremain’s brisk short stories tend to be hooked on highly symbolic artefacts. Thus the East German border guard of ‘The Beauty of the Dawn Shift’, cycling off to illusory salvation in Russia, takes with him a solitary lemon, ‘a precious possession’ turned up in an otherwise fruit-free grocery store. A middle-aged woman working in a Norfolk haberdashery shop covets the unclenched wooden fist of the glove display. The chef in ‘Nativity Story’ nurtures a gleaming oyster shell which he aims to bestow on his absent son. Our minds, as asylum resident Victor in ‘The Ebony Hand’ informs his anxious sister-in-law, are ‘held together by peculiar things’.
The Darkness of Wallis Simpson is full of peculiar things. However enticing these pieces of fruit and ersatz limbs — a lump of steak, even, in ‘How It Stacks Up’ — they are, in the end, only signposts along the path to a more abstract world; that lost Elysian field from which most of Tremain’s characters find themselves eternally debarred.
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