Graeme Lay, alone in a fast-changing world

By MARGIE THOMSON

The short stories in this collection (some new, some previously published) seem meant to be together.

Although the main characters change from one section of the book to the next, they are all, bar one, male. And so by book's end you feel it is just one life that has been encapsulated - a plain, ordinary, emotionally private kind of life, perhaps, but deeply felt.

It's the kind of life in which passion rarely proclaims itself but instead lurks always just beneath the surface, determining the shape of the water if not actually breaking its surface.

What Lay has created is a kind of man alone for the post-colonial age. His characters are unostentatiously middle-class, without confidants or emotional exposure, yet they are hopeful, thoughtful, capable men, alone and sometimes lonely, operating in and being acted on by the world.

None of them are married (although they have been or will be, or are recently out of close relationships). To be alone is an essential condition, even if it's not always a physical reality.

Sounds a bit doleful, but not at all. Wistful, sad, funny, shocking, optimistic (Lay is not above the occasional happy ending) - all these words apply. And, best of all, the stories entertain and satisfy.

Divided into three sections, the stories begin in Kaimara, the town of the title, where Stephen is embarking upon life.

He's up against his parents' small-town conservatism, having to define himself in opposition to their desires for him, as symbolised in Pianoforte: the thwarting of a boy's passion for the piano, first because he likes his teacher too much and later because he won't play the right kind of music.

Stephen grows up, has sex, falls untidily in love (the women seem far tougher and more self-possessed than the men in these stories), works at the pub and in a road gang during his varsity holidays.

All pretty ordinary stuff, yet Lay has a way of slathering on layer after layer of the physical detail of a person, place or activity, until suddenly what you have is an almost visceral jolt of recognition of the truth of the thing and its meaning.

Stephen's observation while working in the pub of the drunken former local rugby star Victor Donovan ("No one from Kaimara had ever become an All Black," we learn) who is on skid row at the age of 25, illustrates the dangers young men must skirt and the choices they must make to move forward in life and to be decent people.

"For the rest of that day Stephen found it difficult to get Victor Donovan out of his mind. He kept remembering his speed, dexterity and uncanny ball skills, and trying to reconcile what the man had been with the person he had served. Victor seemed to have lost his middle years, gone straight from athlete to derelict. Could it really happen like that?"

Stephen later refuses to serve Donovan at the bar, and so loses his job.

We leave Stephen and Kaimara soon after that, and turn instead to the Pacific in the company of a range of characters - Paul, Anthony, David - who all must deal, in their different ways, with disappointment and small betrayals.

Paul finds himself at the mercy of a merciless guide, and later stares into the void of rootlessness when he is smitten by a carefree French beauty.

Anthony has an interesting conversation at the tomb of Robert Louis Stevenson; David stands on the sidelines of a woman's dissatisfaction with her marriage.

These are all contemporary stories and show us the Pacific as it is, as well as how we dream it (that is, its beauty and desirability to travellers is manifest but so is its seedier side, and the smouldering resentment of some of its people towards rich outsiders).

We spend the final six stories with Richard Treadwell, an academic in the anthropology department of a university and, most significantly as far as he sees it, a poet who has been for many years the increasingly reluctant secretary of the Northern Literary Society.

Divorced and living alone, over the course of these stories he works hard to resuscitate the failing society (and his own reputation as a poet) by bringing in several guests who may (but usually and spectacularly do not) revive the ageing group and bring in new members.

We see that Richard is up against it in every area of his life: embattled by postmodernists and the avant garde, ageing literary cranks and snobs (some of whom skate perilously close to being recognisable in the real world - Wynston Turnov, K.C. Daets?) and nasty game-playing academics, he has the occasional triumph but in the end is forced to consider himself the quintessential outsider, a prisoner in a fast-changing world.

Things look bleak, but just when he least expects it an opportunity, dressed to look like a booby prize, comes along.

And so the collection ends on an upnote, the finger about to be given to his chief jailer, and love whispering in the wings.

These are deceptively simple, ordinary stories, told with old-fashioned straightforwardness and physical descriptiveness, but also with great purpose and delightful clarity.

They're not trendy or avant garde, but why should they be? They skilfully evoke a particular sort of life: a non-glorified man, alone, but quietly not letting the buggers get him down.

Graeme Lay: The Town at the end of the world

Tandem Press

$27.95