Benjamin Myers' Male Tears re-evaluates masculinity

Masculinity is currently being re-evaluated. Balances are changing and this reassessment is reflected by book publishing. New fiction releases, particularly, are now more often written by women and fiction book awards reflect this. Benjamin Myers, however, is a prize-winning British male writer and his work is also a part of this re-calibration, approaching the subject from an entirely different angle.

Myers' work is often grounded in the natural world and his prose is bold. In The Offing, his bestselling novel, Robert Appleyard looks back on a summer when he was 16, taken in by an older woman living in a remote English bay, and given perspectives on life through learning about her past. His new collection of short stories, Male Tears, demonstrates his full range.

It is an extremely diverse book. Subjects range from an incident of ritual in the life of a nomadic Neolithic couple to an interview between a magazine writer and a reclusive recording artist. Stories can be as short as a page or more than 60. They can be realistic evocations of contemporary rural life or enigmatic parables. Some are very successful.

In The Folk Song Singer, for example, a 35-year-old male journalist interviews a 60-year-old woman, once a legendary folk singer, who has just released her first album in decades. She is famously "reticent" – and somewhat tetchy. She does not suffer unconsidered questions asked for the thousandth time.

It is a perfectly controlled story, where the reader discovers two distinct characters, their expectations of each other in this professional encounter, and just what happens when it crosses into the personal. It is touchingly vivid with a bitter-sweet sting.

"Suburban Animals" is a gut-wrenching account of a boy with Down syndrome at the hands of other boys, seen through the eyes of his younger brother. "An English Ending" is a tragedy, where a woman is faced with a stark decision after murdering her brutal husband. For some readers, Myers' realism will be confronting.

In A Thousand Acres of English Soil, for instance, a farm boy finds an illegal gin-trap in a rubbish dump. It is a hard story to read for the squeamish, but asks important questions, introducing Myers' tendency towards the teaching parable. This is a style that comes into full bloom with other pieces, like The Museum of Extinct Animals or A River, which are less successful. It is a hard genre to master; anything less than the profound does not truly succeed.

By focusing on human relationships no matter the setting, Myers provides a counter-balance to the political and gendered truisms of the contemporary era. His is a necessary and memorable corrective.

Reviewed by David Herkt

Male Tears, by Benjamin Myers (Bloomsbury, $33)