Flouting all those pieties

If not equal to his best novels, Kingsley Amis’s short stories are still wonderfully entertaining, says Philip Hensher

Some writers of short fiction — there doesn’t seem to be a noun to parallel ‘novelist’ — are dedicated craftsmen, like Chekhov, Kipling, William Trevor, Alice Munro or V.S. Pritchett. Others, like Evelyn Waugh or E.M. Forster, are more haphazard, producing stories to commission, or as a sketch, to try something out in moments when an idea on a small scale seems to be all that inspiration can supply. The result, when the collected edition finally surfaces, is generally more varied in surface than the works of the specialist — just think of Dickens’s stories, written for odd occasions and generally at short order. But, however packed with interest they are, stories by the casual dabbler will rarely have the august authority of those of the master.

Kingsley Amis was very much an author who, in his larger works, would try something out, see what success it had and then move on to something else. His novels of the late 1960s and early 1970s, which was in many ways his most confident and interesting period, include two powerfully expressive, minatory masterpieces in Ending Up and Girl, 20; two fascinating, unforgettable, flawed novels in I Want It Now and The Anti-Death League; and four major exercises in specific genres, spy thriller, ghost story, roman policier and alternate-world sci-fi. Even when, as in Ending Up or the superb ghost story The Green Man, he must have known he had scored a major success, he always moved on swiftly, sometimes to a less resounding achievement.

If this is true of the novels, then it is very much more so of the collected short stories. They are, in the most positive sense, a mixed bag. They are written by a man with plenty of interests in life, a large capacity for changing his mind and containing contrasting, even conflicting opinions within himself.