Tough talking about sex

Short Stories:Sexuality; its doubts, its excitement, its egotistical self-affirmation, dominate these poised, assured, if collectively repetitive stories.

Read at one sitting it makes for a tough, somewhat claustrophobic, but always conversational experience. She is simply telling the reader what happened, but the rush of information proves bizarrely exhausting.

Hadley has already written two novels, one of which - her second, Everything Will Be All Right - is good. Her stories, however, possess an aggressive, clinical ease that ultimately oppresses. Interestingly, one of the two most convincing stories is the first, and title, narrative. In it, two young women, "best friends from school", are now mothers (three children each) and their domestic careers are in full flow.

Before we meet them, Hadley, in one of the strongest sequences in the book, sets the scene. Her technique is detached, cinematic and deliberate, with a trace of reportage. She evokes a particular sense of an Englishness from an earlier time: "The seafront really isn't the sea but the Bristol Channel: Wales is a blue line of hills on the other side. The district council has brought sand from elsewhere and built a complicated ugly system of sea walls and rock groynes to keep it in and make the beach more beach-like, but the locals say it will be washed away at the first spring tide."

Without a nod to sentimentality, she comments matter-of-factly: "It's hard to believe that the same boys and girls who have PlayStations and the Internet still care to go paddling with shrimping nets in the rock pools left behind when the tide recedes, but they do, absorbed in it for hours as children might have been decades and generations ago."

This is the world of the seaside holiday, complete with shops selling metal buckets and spades and flags. Not forgetting the pink-skinned people. Then the camera of Hadley's narrative voice closes in on two women, who "look, if it still means anything, bohemian".

Both are thoroughly described. Hadley is drawn to near forensic descriptions of her characters and of the settings they inhabit. After a while, it becomes a weakness in the writing, that and her schoolteacher-like determination to spell everything out. There is too much information and no pauses, no silences. Here is a writer who appears to have little faith in the reader's ability - and need - to do some of the work. What she is very good at, though, is articulating the essential unease which exists even between close friends. Humans are wary and greedy, and Hadley knows this and explores it time and again.

RACHEL AND HER husband own a holiday cottage; Janie and her partner are visiting. The friends talk and the conversation invariably returns to sex; the trouble with being in settled relationships with children is that sex becomes difficult and retreats increasingly into a fantasy dimension. This is exactly what has happened to Rachel, whose mind is now occupied by the possibilities of illicit romance. Sexual tension does strike, but it is slightly different. Hadley exploits the randomness and chance timing of sexual encounters, and this becomes a theme.

In another good story, the best in fact (Buckets of Blood), a young girl sets off to visit her older sister who is now at university. The girl, Hilary, views the visit as a bid for freedom from the shabby family vicarage, home to nine children. Sheila's return from university at Christmas only served to highlight the squalor of a house served by "the old Ascot gas heater" that "only dribbled out hot water". While their father ("a tall narrow man, features oversized for the fine bones of his face, he smiled as if he was squinting into a brash light") seems at peace with his lot, his wife, the mother of the children, is a study in stress who looked "less like a vicar's wife than a wild woman. She was as tall as their father but if the two of them were ever accidentally seen standing side by side it looked as if she had been in some terrible momentous fight for her life and he hadn't".

Of all the characters in this collection, so many of whom are battling for their personal and sexual identity, with none does Hadley so achieve a sense of a living, breathing individual as she does with this embattled mothering mother - a caricature made real.

Almost in flight then, Hilary seeks her sister's exciting college life. But instead she is greeted at the station by a young man who has come to fetch her because her sister is ill. There is no glamour, only the discovery of her sister's predictable misadventure. Hadley is interested in the rivalry that undercuts relationships between friends and sisters. To this, she adds the notion of fantasy as a release.

The past, the present and the future act as so many balls tossed in the air by characters who make choices but who, most of all, have time to consider their actions and even, at times, try to revise them. Sunstroke will impress by its ambivalent candour. At times, Hadley appears a bit too curt, a bit too knowing, and dangerously brisk - her narrow, preoccupied narratives tail off as if she has simply lost interest - yet this is a brooding, real-life collection bruised by knowledge and sustained by familiar discomfort.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times

Sunstroke By Tessa Hadley Cape, 154pp. £11.99