Alice Munro: Runaway

Isaac Bashevis singer once observed that it was his ambition to write stories "no one else can tell". It was a goal he often fulfilled triumphantly. The remark has particular relevance in regard to the art of Alice Munro, which merits the description incomparable.

There are other fine Canadian storytellers — one thinks of the pioneering Morley Callaghan and Margaret Laurence and, more recently, of Carol Shields — but no one else has Munro's disconcerting way with narrative.

Her gift, as demonstrated in the grand tales of her maturity, is to pull the rug from beneath the reader's feet at the very point where he or she feels secure. These reminders of the haphazard nature of human relationships are delivered to chilling effect, frequently in one well-placed sentence.

The eight stories in this new collection have one-word titles. Of these, Passion can be ranked alongside her best work. It tells of a woman, Grace, raised by an aunt and uncle in a poor region of the Ottawa Valley. Grace is keen on self-improvement, studying geography, history, languages and mathematics in a culture where girls are expected not to be too clever.

She is doing a holiday job, working as a waitress when an engineering student, Maury Travers, asks her out on a date. She accepts, and soon she is going to dinner and spending Sundays with Maury's rich family. She is befriended by Maury's mother, and it is assumed she will marry Maury.

Mrs Travers has another son by a previous husband, who has died. Neil Borrow is a successful doctor with an irritable wife, Mavis, and a couple of small children. Halfway through Passion, Neil tends Grace when she injures her foot. Almost immediately, Grace detects in Neil, whose breath smells of whisky and mint, a dangerous quality lacking in the dutiful Maury. Neil involves Grace in a brief adventure, with bleak consequences. Grace's attraction for Neil is never explained, and doesn't need to be. Passion is all about a certain, reckless way of growing up, of seeing the world as it really is, of how temporary excitement can seem more alluring than patient respect.

Three stories have the same principal character, a classicist called Juliet. She is first encountered in Chance on a train. A stranger tries to start a conversation. Juliet rebuffs him and — yet again — the consequences are bleak.

On that same trip, she meets Eric, the man with whom she chooses to live. He is nursing a terminally ill wife in Whale Bay, where he has a fishing business. She joins him there, on an impulse, at the end of the story.

We next meet her in Soon, set in 1969, when she visits her parents, Sam and Sara, who have both retired from teaching. She brings her infant daughter, Penelope. Sara is a martyr to her heart condition, and Munro captures to perfection the calculated helplessness the sick employ to make the healthy feel guilty.

Juliet crops up once more in Silence, which is concerned with the adult Penelope's estrangement from her mother following Eric's death. I have to record, with some dismay, that this time she is no longer interesting.

Munro has to be judged by the highest standards, the standards she sets herself. Runaway contains two stories that don't meet them. Tricks too accurately accounts for its method and content, with an implausible discovery in its closing pages. In Powers, potentially the most resonant story, she becomes diffuse, wayward and unsure of where she is going.

These criticisms are not easy to express but Passion is wonderful and Runaway good with insights to treasure throughout.

* Paul Bailey is a London-based novelist and reviewer.

* Chatto & Windus, $49.95