The kindest of pathologists

Runaway
By Alice Munro
Chatto Windus £15.99, 333 pages

Alice Munro is one of the great storytellers of our time, descended from a line going back to Chekhov and Katherine Mansfield.

Her tales of contemporary Canadian life are offered through traditional narrative forms that would not have been out of place in the 19th century. She mainly employs third person narrators who, while watching closely, do not obtrude themselves and do not judge. As a result, her short stories have a classic, timeless appeal. They suggest that human beings are the same, deep down, wherever they live and whatever they go through. In whatever century they occur, the confusions, muddles and disappointments of life demand that we respond with humour and compassion.

These calm, quiet qualities are the benchmarks of Munro’s writing. She is similar to the late Penelope Fitzgerald in regarding her protagonists with understanding and tenderness - but never with sentimentality.

Munro understands suffering, sympathises with her characters trying to ward off the blows dispatched randomly by fate. In the short story “Runaway”, an older woman, mistakenly trying to help a younger one who says she wants to leave her husband, has to be stoical and conciliatory when her attempts at female solidarity go wrong. The young woman returns to her difficult husband. Nothing, apparently, will ruffle the surface of their marriage. Unwittingly, however, the older woman reveals a scary clue to the revenge of which the husband is capable. In “Trespasses”, another older woman appears to be harassing a much younger one. Old, buried, secrets come to light. The older woman retains her griefs, and hangs on to shreds of dignity.

Munro’s trick with these stories is to open with an arresting image that we later discover forms the heart of the story, to take it and surround it with other facts, to give it deeper meaning by embedding it in a historical narrative.

These stories have the density and impact of much longer works. What a generous writer Munro is: a lesser one would pad the stories out and publish them separately as novels.

Munro prefers to give us tales that are almost novellas, to offer juicy pieces of plot with large gaps left in between, her narrative leaping exhilaratingly over them. Perhaps she does this to allow the reader’s imagination to work fulltime. Also, I think, she wants to allow herself to consider whole liftetimes, but to select the essential moments.

Hers is a forensic, dissecting art, yet she is the kindest of pathologists. The three long, connected stories that reflect on the adventures of her character called Juliet are masterpieces of economy and depth. We see Juliet as a young woman, a middle-aged one, an older one, and follow her through the love she feels for the man she meets by chance on a train and for the daughter she subsequently bears. Juliet has to meet tragedy head-on, but we do not. Munro approaches it obliquely, like Emily Dickinson, urging: tell the truth but tell it on a slant.

Munro is very good on love. Juliet, once her lover has died, reflects how “she kept constantly referring to him, in her mind, as if he was still the person to whom her existence mattered more than it could to anyone else. As if he was still the person in whose eyes she hoped to shine. Also the person to whom she presented arguments, information, surprises.”

Munro is equally good on the lust and sex that precede love, partly because she does not go into clinical or pornographic detail, preferring instead to rely on her characters’ inside sense of the surprises going on:

”She can tell by his voice that he is claiming her. She stands up, quite numb, and sees that he is older, heavier, more impetuous than she has remembered. He advances on her and she feels herself ransacked from top to bottom, flooded with relief, assaulted by happiness. How astonishing this is. How close to dismay.” Read this book.