My social media timelines are full of people posed looking serious with weighty novels, announcing gravely that they’ll be seeing out their coronavirus confinement by reading War and Peace or Infinite Jest or Europe Central. I have to confess that I’m so frazzled that I can hardly read a tweet without interrupting myself to refresh the news feed and so AL Kennedy’s latest collection of wise, funny, human short stories came at just the right time. I dipped in and out of them over the course of a couple of days and emerged feeling better about the world than I had in a while.
Kennedy is a strange writer, wilfully difficult to classify, hugely prolific. This is her seventh collection of short stories (Kennedy, at only 54, also has 10 novels and four works of nonfiction to her name). Here, we are introduced to a typically eccentric cast of characters, each of them caught in seemingly very different situations linked only by their struggle to answer the existential question posed by the collection’s title.
Almost all of the characters in these stories are, as one of them describes himself, “unreliable in the head”, prone to visions and elaborate self-delusions, all in the attempt to get through the day. Kennedy is brilliant at subtly shifting the ground of her stories, gently rotating your perspective so that by the end you’re facing in quite the other direction, not sure of how you got there. So it is that in Panic Attack, your suspicions about the intentions of the mumbling, “one-man bridgehead”, Ronnie, slowly change into something entirely different; similarly, the description of the Salazar, a restaurant that is “a glorious survival of Old Chelsea”, starts off seductively, making the “you” the story addresses feel quite at home, before you realise the waspish intelligence at work here.
It’s hard, in these horrifying times, to read anything without seeing within it dark new significations, shadows of the present on this book written in a very different past. This is a collection about the difficulty of living with each other – whether in a marriage (the newlywed in Walker), in a political system (the protester in It Might Be Easier to Fail) or in war and the aftermath of it (in the collection’s two standout stories: Unanswered and Even Words Have Meaning).
Two of the final three pieces of the book – New Mexico and Spider – are full of foreboding and are deeply unsettling. In the first, a presenter milking the podverse’s obsession with true crime reveals a story of her own to match that of her subjects; in Spider, a mother allows her darkest fears to seize control of her life. But then, relief. In the final, titular tale, a woman and her lover are at the top of Cologne Cathedral and we’re at first unsure as to what they feel for one another, if they are in danger, even. But then love breaks over them, we realise that love had been there all along and we leave the couple facing their return to England: “Tomorrow we’ll fly back to our little island. We don’t know what will save us there. We’ll want to save each other, be the saving of each other. We’ll hope to be lucky, lucky enough. Tiny, tiny. Gentle, gentle. Lucky, lucky. We are all attempting to survive our time.”
• We Are Attempting to Survive Our Time by AL Kennedy is published by Jonathan Cape (£16.99)
