Helen Dunmore’s first collection of short stories, Love of Fat Men, ended on a note of deliberate and self-conscious suspension; two friends, Ulli and Edith, are walking across the frozen Baltic, having strayed a little too far from the shore, as the snow starts to roll in.
Enlarged, Edith and Ulli would be cell-like clumps of dots, like embryos held together in the loose grip of one particular moment before the wind changed, before the snow covered them or stopped falling, before they reached or failed to reach the shore.
The piece was called “Girls on Ice”, a too-knowing title, unredeemed by a deliberately intrusive authorial voice disowning it as “Trying to be ambiguous. Trying too hard.” Maybe, that voice opined, “it’s only by not having a title at all that you can hold onto the itch of the moment.” Dunmore is a poet and a novelist; it is the poet in her who seems to have the upper hand in her short stories, with their deliberate ambiguities, their wilful indeterminacies and itchy moments. This is not necessarily a good thing.
That image – of the snow-smothered figures resembling embryos – is calculated to chime with other stories of chilled lives and still-born children. (The nastiest of the stories in that collection is about a woman clinging for years to the tiny corpse of her very premature daughter.) One was of Ulli herself, in an earlier tale, pregnant at sixteen. Ulli, a troubled Finnish girl, starred in nine (and possibly ten) of the stories in Love of Fat Men, and she returns in Dunmore’s second collection, Ice Cream. Her stories are snapshots from various times in her life, and do not appear in chronological order. She is still pregnant, for instance, in “The Kiwi Fruit Arbour” in Ice Cream, though we presume she does not keep the child. The fact that we do not know, and the fact that we do not know whether she was a protagonist in a tenth story in Love of Fat Men, is a result of Dunmore’s reliance on the indeterminate. It is by keeping things vague that she renders them disturbing, but often she does no more than that. One suspects that Ulli’s life story might have been more satisfactorily rendered in a novel, rather than in a series of impressionistic portraits. Sometimes the Ulli stories flirt with something more postmodern, stylistically, but they lack the nerve to follow through thoroughly.
The best of the new stories – “My Polish Teacher’s Tie”, “The Clear and Rolling Water”, “Coosing” – take a dramatic incident or situation and deftly fill in its context and emotional aftermath. They are conventional and highly effective. In the less distinct pieces – “The Fag”, “Ice Cream”, “Swimming into the Millennium” (the title of this last misspelt, in the usual way, on the contents page) – a mood or aspiration is summoned, a poem’s worth of atmosphere, but nothing more tangible. “Ice Cream” depicts a young model succumbing, to the outrage of her trainer, to her desire for the forbidden pleasures of ice cream. That she should do so, we are in no doubt, is a Good Thing. The last line, “Clara, Clara… Clara swallows” is presumably an allusion to “But Celia, Celia, Celia shits”, and therefore rescues women’s real physicality from male disgust, making it celebratory instead. Hence the story which follows it, “Be Vigilant, Rejoice, Eat Plenty”, where the advice given by a ghost in a machine (a parking meter, in fact) to a plucky divorcee encourages her to take her time, and have a few pastries, to the same complicitous delight of catering staff and reader alike. But that’s it. As Bjork once said, slightly more entertainingly, “yes to food is yes to life.”
As well as that supernatural parking-meter fable, there are a couple of other forays into genre writing. “Leonardo, Michelangelo, Superstork” is a science-fiction story, set in an age of eugenics, controlled fertility and designer babies. A brave couple have to become renegades in order to have a “normal” child. It is a competent if Manichean piece, but nowhere near as good as, say, Brian Aldiss’s “Supertoys Last All Summer Long”, a haunting story by someone who could transform the genre rather than simply borrowing from it. The ghost story “Mason’s Mini Break” is a satirical jab at the expense of egotistic male metropolitan writers, invoking the spirit of Charlotte Brontë, and it barely rises beyond cute.
It is difficult not to feel manipulated at times: the good characters are noble in adversity, the bad are straw men, mocked without difficulty. “You Stayed Awake With Me”, on the other hand, works well, and the final “yes” of the story is productively ambiguous, in keeping with the tale’s many unanswered questions.
If the question raised by some of these stories – especially the ones where portentousness is wrung from pretty slender materials – is “so what?” or “why should I care?”, the final piece comes ready-framed with an answer. “This is an old story, which my grandfather first told me when I was about the same age as Lisette.” Lisette, we discover, is the child of a philanthropic and achingly selfless couple, and all are presumed to have died at Auschwitz. It ends: “This isn’t my story. It isn’t even my grandfather’s story, although I heard it from him. But I felt I had to tell you, even if you’re tired of it, even if you’ve heard it all before.” We have heard it before, and can never, in conscience, refuse to hear it again. But there are hard questions to ask about literature on this topic, and whose story it truly is; even if, in a brief review, they cannot be properly raised, and even if we have, indeed, asked them before.