Swansong at twilight

It is, if you stop to think about it, an important literary question: what, exactly, is the point of short stories? They so often can — to this reader at least — be dismissed merely as stunted or early-aborted novels, a single idea gestated in the writer’s imagination that has inescapably failed to divide, multiply and develop into a full-grown body of work. They feel incomplete, inconsequential, unsatisfying. Fortunately, Francis King has shown us a (perhaps the) redeeming feature. He has realised that a short story is the perfect form to tell of shortened existence, of life not being allowed fully to develop or finally being brought to an end. His writing is dissatisfied, but not unsatisfying.

Certainly, this collection is tinged and tainted by grief throughout, like an old album of sepia-stained photographs. Every story contains the presence of death, from the first, ‘Mouse’, in which an old man recalls the premature loss in wartime of his boyhood prefect and love (‘his body shuddered against mine.