Visionary tales: Mrs Calder and the Hyena, by Marjorie Ann Watts, reviewed

One of the pleasures of reading, often looked down on in literary circles, is when one warms to an author’s characters. Among the many delights of Mrs Calder and the Hyena, Marjorie Ann Watts’s second collection of short stories, was my feeling that here were people with whom I would get along. Ostensibly, they are undistinguished – from the hinterlands of society, whether by virtue of status, wealth or age; yet they reveal some irrepressible glint of antinomianism, a rejection of conventional judgments and standards, a certain anarchic glee.

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In the title story, elderly Mrs Calder insists she is being accompanied by a hyena – ‘always a little on the edge of my vision, but definitely getting closer’. For her daughter, this is the latest disturbing manifestation of her mother’s lifelong eccentricity; for the hospital, to which her daughter has referred her, it is the probable onset of dementia. To the percipient reader, however, it is what T.S. Eliot called an objective correlative: the outward representation of an inner condition. An untamed, feral side of Mrs Calder reacts to what she perceives as human absurdity and the approach of death with savage, remorseless laughter.

As in the fiction of Penelope Fitzgerald, with whom Watts shares attributes, there runs through these stories the sometimes unnerving perspective of the visionary. Mrs Calder, oblivious to her daughter’s concerns, makes for the cemetery where her husband is buried and lies down in the damp grass:

Visions of an infinite, blazing, multicoloured graveyard… swelled through her like a great chorus. In the centre of this immense fairground sat the hyena: a small figure at this distance, but she could hear it laughing quite clearly.