A slow burn fails to ignite

Short Stories: The ordinary can - and does - often inspire artists. Writers alert to the magical in the ordinary are praised for their insight and their ability to avoid the obvious.

This collection of stories by one of contemporary British literature's unsung heroes, Adam Thorpe who is a poet as well as fiction writer, neither catches the magical, nor the profound. But then, perhaps profundity is not his aim, unfortunately the stories fail to catch the reader. There is no pang of realisation, it is too calculated, too mild.

Several of the 15 stories in this collection lack any spark. In one of them, the title story, which does have a potential VS Pritchett element, Thorpe writes of a character: "Jonathan was out of his depth." This could be said of the entire volume. There is a marked feeling that Thorpe, the author of Ulverton (1992) who is a novelist honed by traditional rather than experimental values, is markedly out of his depth in the short fiction form.

His meditative, thoughtful style lends itself to narratives that evolve. He is not a writer to catch the reader with an intense burst that feels like punch; his approach is to slowly offer a thought, a reflection and step back, while it flows over the reader.

It is as if the natural elegance of his prose has been affected. The economy of the short story in the hands of Thorpe becomes hurried, almost raw. The conversational does not suit him. He is simply uncomfortable and few of these narratives convince. "David's hobby was a statement, of course; Gillian knew that. If anyone asked, Gillian would say he was a hiker, that hiking was his hobby. Really, what she wanted to say was that he was an awkward sod." It is not a promising beginning and this dullness marks what follows.

Elsewhere, in The Concert Interval. the percussionist, disillusioned by his wife and her giggling friends, and by life itself, walks out during the interval of a performance and predictably continues walking. "He walked until he was in an area he didn't know, with strange houses and unknown streets. His breath showed on the damp air and he didn't have his coat, but he was exhilarated." It does not work. Thorpe is going through the motions and in the final line, the musician ponders the impact of his absence. "At last they would know him. At last they would know who he really was, in the roar of consternation." Yet both the story and the intended defiance fall flat.

He is attempting to explore the situations that arise from circumstances. In the title story, two unlikely men are not so much brought together as juxtaposed. Jonathan at 52 has just completed the novel he spent a decade writing. He has been summoned by a publisher. His dreams appear about to be fulfilled, but the publisher never read the manuscript - his wife did. The distraction had horrific consequences for the couple, causing the publisher to berate the aspiring novelist. "It's not OK. If you hadn't written anything, if you'd just stuck to your . . . humble position in life, and not reckoned like every other . . . fucker in the country that you could apply pen to paper and write, then I would not be . . . in my present position. Which is that of . ... . ." It is a tragedy with a bizarre revenge finale worthy of a Greek play, but, as with the rest of the stories, it fails to convince.

Throughout this disappointingly flat book, it is impossible not to think back to Ulverton, Thorpe's atmospheric and imaginative debut with its echoes of Graham Swift's outstanding achievement, Waterland (1983). Both novels share an artificiality of form, and Ulverton is as contrived and as deliberate as in any fiction by Peter Ackroyd. But Ulverton, which relates scenes spanning 300 years of the daily life and history of an invented Wessex village as narrated by a series of individual voices, soars and possesses immense artistic conviction. Although none of his subsequent works have matched it, Thorpe is a talented writer and gifted poet whose feel for language is his abiding strength.

There is no doubt that Ulverton suffered by comparison with Waterland. Added to this is Thorpe's having long been domiciled in France. He is an European writer, although these stories, dependent on squib-like stings, are firmly rooted in the most mundane of contemporary British magazine fiction. In common with Tim Parks who has spent more than 20 years living and working in Italy, Thorpe is a British writer working beyond the London literary Pale.

For all those who have mistakenly criticised William Trevor, who has resided for the past half century outside the Ireland that he has continued to write about, it is interesting to note exactly how much closer Trevor is to Ireland that Thorpe is to England.

If this average volume of, at best only competent stories, achieves anything, it may be to direct readers back to Ulverton, a mythically desentimentalised evocation of rural life that sings through its lyricism, rich sense of history and imaginative engagement that testifies to exactly how good an on-form Adam Thorpe is. Just bypass this current offering.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times

Is This The Way You Said? By Adam Thorpe Cape, 279pp. £14.99