Autumnal northern lights

Where are the songs of Spring? Well, certainly not in these short stories about people in crabbed old age or looking hard at death. Only in the last one, ‘The Silence’, where an ancient composer who believes that ‘the logic of music is eventually silence’, is any longing expressed to see ‘the cranes fly south again’ towards the wine-growing countries that nourished Beethoven, not these where ‘soured milk rules the roost’.

Most of the collection is set in soured milk countries: pale, Nordic places. Yet in the title Barnes uses the symbol of a lemon. But the lemon, he says, has nothing to do with sunshine. It is the Chinese symbol of death and those who want to reflect together on mortality can sit round ‘the lemon table’. The dead in China can sometimes be found with a lemon in their hand. It sounds morbid, but then, says one character, the artist is necessarily morbid because he has terrible sorrows.

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Not that the book is concerned altogether with the artistic temperament. Most of the characters are remarkable for their ordinariness. They are almost featureless and choose to be. They expect little from life. In the first funny but rather limp story, ‘A Short History of Hairdressing’ we watch the passage of a lifetime’s small events happening to a small man. The best stories are those where the aged make discoveries about themselves, usually about their inconsequent lives, and a splendid, rebellious example is ‘The Fruit Cage’ where an old, long-married husband much abused at home is revealed as the long-term lover of a woman he and his wife have always been supposed to despise (she has earrings made like snail-shells and hair out of a bottle). After the debacle, when the husband ambles in with her permanently, he begins to amble back again to do odd jobs around his old house and one day his wife hits him over the head with an unknown instrument.