Intelligent insights

SHORT STORIES: What Becomes, By AL Kennedy, Jonathan Cape, 217pp. £16.99

FUNNY PLACE, the human mind, scary place: in fact, who in their right mind would want to be trapped in one, least of all their own? Who else but the ever innovative, always daring Scottish literary original AL Kennedy would gleefully assemble a collection of stories that share the theme of the mind messily at work? For her, the mind is reactive.

Interestingly, memory is only a support act. The real business she is exploring is how the mind reacts to everyday sensations and observations.

Be warned, Kennedy is a good storyteller, and an even better observer, possessing immaculate timing; after all, she has a second career, as a stand-up comic. Above all, she is dangerously intelligent – the simplest throwaway gag can come complete with a sinister undertone. She also writes very well: there is an almost jaunty ease about her prose. The comedy is often rugged, streetwise and wised-up. There can be a great deal of thinking; perhaps a bit less feeling. There’s another caution – the feelings of despair and panic are well and truly present, but filtered through irony rather than sentimentality.

As early as the opening story, which is the title piece, that awesome, forensic intelligence is at work. Frank decides to go to the movies, but instead of driving off to a multiplex, he has opted for the sanctuary of a tiny cinema, 12 rows deep. “How did they make any money with a place this small?”, he thought, “Even if it was packed? Which it wasn’t.”

So there he was, sitting in the cinema. “The film had no sound. What Frank had, at first, thought was an artistic effect was, in fact, a mistake – perhaps a deliberate mistake.

“He kept watching. Sometimes when he’d been abroad, he’d gone to the cinema in foreign languages and managed to understand the rough flow of events. He’d been entertained well enough.

“But this was an artistic piece, complicated. People seemed to be talking to each other a good deal, and with a mainly unreadable calmness . . . he was lost.” Frank is on the run from a horrible loss. Kennedy never relaxes either the tension or the magic.

Elsewhere, in Wasps, a housewife prepares herself for the final abandonment. She watches as Ray, her husband, who regularly goes out into the world, leaves the house. Perhaps this is the final departure. There is no warning; everything seems normal enough, the weather is foul and he "leans forward to the storm. It buffets him . . . punches his tie against his face, slaps under his coat and she watches him struggle and thinks this is how it should start – the timely intervention of some higher authority . . . The coming rain should swing down like a blade."

This picture of a man being beaten by the weather becomes a moment of punishment. This is how he will be disciplined for leaving his wife and sons. Many of the characters in these stories retreat into an alternative screen, they knowhow it is and also imagine how it should be.

At times it is as if Kennedy's imagination is running beyond the narratives. In Edinburgh, Peter has a shop; his back may be sore but the pain doesn't prevent him assessing his customers. There is a noticeboard at the back of the shop "shaggy with leaflets that advertised books about Spirit Guides and retreats that would heal you with horses . . . Sell organic food and imitation bacon and suddenly folk thought you'd tolerate anything. Poorly-looking lunatics would rush at you from miles around with news of whatever had saved them from themselves." It is obvious he is on the edge, as are most of the inhabitants of these, or any, stories by Kennedy. She has no interest in complacency. The narrator of Saturday Teatimeis looking for peace, and suspects it will continue to elude her, even within the soothing waters of a floatation tank. "My head will keep on racing throughout this, I have no doubt." Kennedy has created a convincing, likeable narrator, a woman with a sense of humour as well as an army of ghosts to deal with. However, the strength of the story lies in the dry humour and the candour; the horror, when it surfaces, is less distressing than one might think. And the subject, a damaged childhood, merits due concern. But there is a problem with these stories in that at their most serious, the drama has been diluted by the laconic delivery.

IT IS WORTHrepeating that Kennedy is a gifted stand-up comic. Her vision of the world is as sharp as razor wire, the sharpest wire money can buy. Several of the one-liners are gold and the story Whole Family with Young Children Devastated, dominated by the narrator's exasperated response to seeing a number of neatly presented posters asking for help in locating a beloved pet dog, is very funny. Only marginally less funny than the masterful Story of My Lifein which the narrator shares the painful history of her beleaguered teeth: "So when I'm twenty-four, twenty-five, I'm back in the surgery – new dentist – and the first of my wisdom teeth is leaving." It is easy to imagine this wonderful yarn being delivered in a live performance by a Kennedy alert to every pause, each nuance.

The tale keeps coming in a series of thrilling instalments. "To be fair, the dentist was upset – looking down at me and saying, 'Oh, dear,' a number of times before offering a seat in his office and an explanation involving wrongly positioned nerves – it was technically my fault for having provided them." Perhaps it is strange but it seems that Kennedy is, at least in this book, at her most comfortable and convincing when working within her by now brilliantly well developed first-person voice. The weakest piece is Sympathy, in which two strangers attempt to jolly their way through sex in a hotel room. It reads as if it should have been in the film Love, Actuallybut was considered too feeble even for that.

As God Made Usspins on a dazzling exchange in which a teacher at a swimming pool approaches a group of men, who have lost limbs, asking them not to swim in case they upset her students. It is a good story, subdued and tightly written; for once Kennedy's comic verve is in check. The hapless young man in Vanish tries so hard to please his ungrateful girlfriend, only to find she leaves him with a spare ticket for an unusual magic show. Anyone who has ever suffered in the name of romance will experience his embarrassment.

TWICE INCLUDEDin the Granta Best of Young British Novelists selection, Kennedy is assured and complex. This, her fifth collection, does convey the ease of someone who is confident in her vision. But it is fair to expect much more than this of her. After all, her books – aside from the disappointing Everything You Need(1999) – include an outstanding second novel, So I Am Glad(1995), while three of her previous short story collections, her debut Night Geometry and the Garscadden Trains(1990), Now That You're Back(1995) and particularly Original Bliss(1997), her finest collection to date, leave What Becomesslightly in the shade. Her fifth novel, Day,deservedly won the 2007 Costa Book of the Year award, while Paradise(2004), a remarkable narrative in which an alcoholic woman confronts her life if not her mistakes, not only showcases the wry, driving comic voice Kennedy, who misses absolutely nothing about life or human behaviour, has now perfected. It is a dark, tragic work.

All in all, if it seems that Kennedy’s new collection is suffering in comparison with her previous work, it is not a criticism, merely a confirmation of exactly how good she is. It must be the first time a short-story writer is being chastised for allowing her stand-up monologist’s voice take over, but then nothing is entirely simple about the visceral art of the all-seeing, all-hearing, all-thinking AL Kennedy.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times