fiction

URBAN TALES

THIS ATTRACTIVE COLLECTION of short pieces -- mostly fiction -- reminded me of the old music-hall adage: start with a bang and leave the best acts till the end. Robert Drewe's selection certainly begins with a bang. John Updike's `The City' is the story of a man who arrives in a unnamed city, and sees no more of it than an anonymous hotel room and the hospital where he has his appendix removed. By the end of this cunningly crafted fable, we realise that the city's fascination for Carson, the central character, is directly related to its being unknown, unseen and as much a cipher (and perhaps a menace too) as it was when he arrived, decidely queasy from the airline's freeze-dried peanuts -- or so he thought at the time.

Several of the best stories in this anthology are also concerned with strangers, visitors and outsiders. Maeve Binchy's 'Shepherd's Bush' brings a young Irishwoman to London for an abortion. Drewe's 'Life of a Barbarian' is constructed around an Australian businessman who is caught in an earthquake in Tokyo's Imperial Hotel. Bharati Mukherjee's 'Nostalgia' is a masterly account of how the Porsche-driving, thoroughly Americanised Dr Manny Patel falls victim to his nostalgia for Indian customs, food and women in uptown Manhattan. Peter Carey's familiar 'Room No. 5 (Escribo)' is a strikingly nightmarish evocation of one of those Second or Third World cities racked by rumour, suspicion and the threat of revolution. Graham Swift's 'Seraglio' is a low-key, and for that reason all the more sinister, tale of an English couple's holiday in Istanbul. On a much smaller scale, 'Disnae Matter' by Irvine Welsh (of Trainspotting fame) is an anecdote told in hilarious though almost impenetrable Scots about a punch-up in Disneyland.

The cities (whether real or imagined) in these stories are vivid and menacing because their protagonists are vulnerable and perplexed, as most of us are whenever we find ourselves without bearings. That is particularly evident in Beverley Farmer's 'A Man in the Laundrette' (not, I think, among her most accomplished pieces) in which an Australian woman in New York is troubled as much by the grim enigma of an unfamiliar world as by the man who accosts her in a laundrette. Something of the same deracination colours Frank Moorhouse's 'The New York Bell Captain', a clever if somewhat mannered fable of a man holed up in a hotel room fifteen stories above 'Fifty-Fourth Street -- and the bad end of Fifty-Fourth'.

Those pieces where the characters are in their natural habitats seem to me on the whole less striking, or at least less obvious candidates for inclusion in a volume such as this. Joyce Carol Oates's 'Happy' ('She flew home at Christmas, her mother and her mother's new husband met her at the airport...') does not get beyond the predictable. Naguib Mahfouz's parable 'Blessed Night', the tale of a Cairo drunk who endures a night of disorientation, seems to me to rely for much of its effect on familiarity with Egyptian customs, manners and social structures. Tobias Wolff's 'Next Door' is -- if one wants to be pedantic -- a suburban rather than a city story: unspeakable neighbours may be encountered anywhere, in towns and townships as much as in cities.

Andrew Riemer is the chief book reviewer of The Sydney Morning Herald.

Return to September 1997 / AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW