The Atmospheric Railway: New and Selected Stories, by Shena Mackay
In Waterstones bookshops there are little signs dotted among the fiction shelves, to prompt readers towards new purchases. The signs suggest that if you liked, say, Evelyn Waugh you’d also enjoy Nancy Mitford; or if Ruth Rendell is a favourite you might like to try Barbara Vine. Where the books of Shena Mackay are concerned, however, there could be no such proposition, because her work is quite unlike anyone else’s. Mackay has a slavish and devoted following: Julie Burchill has called her the world’s greatest living writer.
So a new book from Shena Mackay is cause for celebration. Equally at home in the novel and short story forms, her work is often set in the southern suburbs of London or in fading seaside towns: ‘There was a smell of chips in the air and the sky was like the inside of a mussel shell above the ribbed sand squiggled with wormcasts and the flat silver sea.’ Her characters have names like Neville and Beryl. They listen to The Archers on the radio, pop to the shops, have pet cats or retired greyhounds or a budgerigar. Everything is pervaded with a gentle melancholy, like mild homesickness, but it’s also very funny. A shoplifter might be a grandmother on a shopmobility scooter bearing a ‘World’s Best Nan’ sticker. A crumbling block of 1920s flats called Balmoral Court has two letters missing, so a character looking up her first love now finds his address is 13 A MORAL COURT.
Mackay is brilliant at deadpan:
Martin was wearing a black waistcoat unbuttoned over a dark grey flannel shirt with a yellow tie, graphite coloured cords and black suede boots. He looked like what he was, an amateur jazz musician.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in