Tales of Persuasion

Philip Hensher

4th Estate, £14.99

In his introduction to the two volume anthology The Penguin Book of the British Short Story, editor Philip Hensher writes that comedy ‘is at the centre’ of this art form. But it is often a comedy without laughter, and combined with ‘the tripping up of expectations’ and ‘the overturning of an established world’. The best of this humour sits uncomfortably in the reader’s mind. In Hensher’s new, languid collection of stories, alluring entitled Tales of Persuasion, he cleaves closely to this tradition of comic prose.

In one of the shorter peices, ‘A Change in the Weather’, Hensher throws down a mortar attack on 10 Downing Street. On this day a man called George starts work as a clerk in a public service building near Whitehall. He prepares himself for a life of serious labour and curbs his spirit of fun. The explosion should add gravity to George’s new occupation. On the contrary, his fellow workers in the ‘Energy Committee’ treat the whole affair with a sense of playful levity.

George’s new boss, Patrick, congratulates him on getting through the security cordon:‘ “Most people would have given up and gone home and started work tomorrow. But not George! A big gold star on your first day, George.’ Similarly, Patrick’s assistant Andrea proclaims: ‘ “Well there you are then…a mortar attack on 10 Downing Street. I do hope that nice Mr Major is quite alright.” She stood for a moment inspecting George, her mouth slightly open, an expression of amusement in her eyes’. By manipulating the tone and demeanour of his characters, Hensher deftly changes the emotional architecture of the world. It creates a sense of spirited malevolency among these bureaucrats.

Many of the stories here are full of lonely or lone men undergoing some shift of perspective or horizon. ‘The Pierian Spring’, about how some habits rely on others, concerns a writer whose daily writing ritual of sitting alone in a bar with drink and cigarette to hand is disrupted by the smoking ban. In ‘A Time of War’ a Soho hedonist loses his ‘posse’ in London and takes a holiday in war-torn India. Sitting in a near-empty hotel, he meets the one other guest. Their banal conversation - a long list of ‘would you rather be’ questions - alerts him to his ignorance of the world beyond pleasure seeking: ‘Their lives: there was nothing in it but a CV, and a lot going on about love’.

Hensher’s sentences have a light, airy feel and are polished to a shine. Here he is describing the sound of a mobile phone: ‘Somewhere about Lucy a harp twanged. She was surrounded with haloes of annunciatory noises, the harp twanging regularly as if in joy or celebration’. The quality of this passage comes not only from the fresh imagining of an everyday occurrence, but from how appositely it sits within the story. The central character, watching these events, is at the end of his life and suffering from dementia. He has frequent delusions of time and space. The evocation of the harp is a wonderful reminder of his psychology, moving as it is between life and death.

The most engaging story in Tales encompasses another trait of the form that Hensher highlights: the art of performance. In ‘My Dog Ian’ an ‘arts administrator’ falls in love with an Italian woman called Silvia, whose main attraction is that she is ‘Italy in Yorkshire’. Through her he encounters a series of individuals, from a theology professor to an ageing dancer in Florence who was once in West Side Story. They are people who will grab any opportunity to tell the well-rehearsed story of their lives. As the narrator says: ‘Some people are always on stage. Most are destined always to be in the audience.’

Hensher has obviously spent a long time ensconced in the world of the short story. It has clearly paid off. Tales of Persuasion is a delightful read, full of beauty and humour. But you have been warned. This is not a book for those simply seeking pure joy. Every smile brought forth by Hensher’s pellucid prose is accompanied by a feeling that one should not be smiling at all.