Short and often perfect

Living as a Moon by Owen Marshall. Photo / Supplied

I cannot fathom why short stories are not as widely read as they once were when the best of the contemporary work is so entertaining. That was the thought that surfaced as I took in the first beautifully constructed story in this collection, Living as a Moon.

However, I wondered over the next two or three whether the Owen Marshall magic was waning. The stories were very good but a notch below his best. That thought died once I got to the bullying parent in The Detention, the evocative tracking of grief in No Stations of Remorse and, a bit further on, to one of his great stories, the sort that fill you with compassion, Travelling in Eden. This is about group therapy among alcoholics - an easy source of humour exploited by many writers.

The difference is Marshall is bitingly but humanely funny as he slides down into an account of the small agonies that make life so bleak for people struggling through it.

Patrick and the Killer is so knowing a depiction of the human condition that the development of the plot and the plausibility of the actions of the characters stayed with me for days.

The media response is not hard to calculate but what about the reaction of the killer to an act of genuine kindness, and, well, contrition? The more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that the author had got to a psychological truth for these individuals from a range of possibilities.

The rhythm and pace of Marshall's prose is insistently similar from story to story. It could become soporific in the hands of anyone with fewer of the remarkable insights he has into the motivation and behaviour of people and with less of the felicity with which he reports them.

Living As A Moon by Owen Marshall (Random House $44.99)
Reviewed by Gordon McLauchlan

* Gordon McLauchlan is an Auckland writer.