Bernard Steeds: Water

By MICHAEL LARSEN*

Short stories are often disregarded as a form, overshadowed by the supposedly more worthy medium of the novel.

They are, of course an equally valid literary art and, on the whole, one that is a great deal more difficult to get right.

They require the writer to draw characters that engage you quickly, a situation or scenario that is immediately intriguing in some way, and a narrative that must reach its conclusion within a short time without feeling hurried or contrived.

Steeds, a Wellingtonian, gets more than a pass mark for all the above criteria in this, his first collection.

He won the Sunday Star-Times award in 1998, but one story does not a collection make. Fortunately, this collection is full of stories as good or better than The Sea As Past, his 1998 winner.

He is meticulous in his craft, something that shows without detracting from the imaginatively constructed people and situations within Water. His prose is short, crisp but not clipped, not a word wasted.

His characters are indeed seductive, and most importantly, very much alive (even the odd one who dies, if you know what I mean).

My favourite short stories are those that take a supposedly ordinary situation and attack it from a new angle, leaving you viewing the situation - and the world - in a different sense. Steeds is a master at this.

The romantic couple in Swimming, the two friends with a divisive secret in Mississippi, the man trying to understand his dying father in You Make A Life - all familiar in their way, particularly the stories set locally, but all with an edge, an oblique angle that changes our viewpoint.

Water seeps through each story - some more than others - whether it be as the muddy, magnetic Mississippi, as ice statues in the Poe-ish Ice, as a friend, as a constant danger, or as another complete world within our own.

It doesn't dominate as a theme, and in one endearing tale, Small Details, it features as little more than tears on a ghostly face.

The only story that doesn't work is Domesticity, where Steeds outlines a series of mundane articles in an imaginary small-town New Zealand paper, detailing, well, not very much actually. That's meant to be the irony (nothing happens) but it misses somehow. I don't think humour is his forte.

But feelings of dislocation, non-communication, despair, distance - all these things, and their misplacement in the human heart, he writes about wonderfully.

Initially I didn't feel that engaged by some of the stories, but I found myself thinking over them at odd moments of the day, imagining different endings, trying to unravel the characters and their motives.

That, to me, is the mark of a very good writer. I hope he doesn't attempt a novel but continues to hone his craft in this elusive genre.

* Published by Penguin, $27.95

* Michael Larsen is an Auckland freelance writer