Fascination is a collection
of fourteen short stories encompassing a wide range of characters, situations,
and time periods. There is no uniformity to these stories. William Boyd adopts
an experimental approach, with references to Borges, Chekhov and Carver, but
settles on no particular style. If not wholly satisfying, Fascination is
a times compelling, mysterious, even enchanting. We are shown enough of the
characters to understand something of them, although seldom enough to develop a
deep sympathy for them. In some cases the characters are so underdeveloped they
evoke little response at all. William Boyd is a writer who is not satisfied
with a conventional plot, or with a linear narrative, and yet he appears to
need this discipline if he is fully exploit his descriptive powers and
willingness to explore the edges of reality.

The book begins with one of the
lesser lights of the collection, ‘Adult Video’. Edward is a failed writer,
forced to earn a living by reading Conrad to a blind man, and fantasizing about
the life he might have had producing cutting edge fiction. Edward is an
adulterer and a dilettante with whom Boyd creates something of a motif for the
book. ‘Adult Video’ also sets the tone for the fragmented story, slices of life
fragmented further by cutting stories up into brief vignettes, often dislocated
from each other in time. Edward also figures the title story, this time as a
would-be poet, forced to earn a living by sports journalism. Fascination
features the parallel universes of Edward’s fantasies and realities, including
his attempt to seduce the subject of his research, a young high-jumper. There
are many other male characters throughout the book, characters narrated in
first person, ogling at women’s breasts, and with enough luck to get to tell us
about variants of tongue kissing.

One of the distracting features of
the collection is Boyd’s reliance on tiresome weekend writing course devices,
presumably to stimulate the creative juices. ‘Adult Video’ comprises small
sections prefaced by commands from a video recorder, ‘Beulah Berlin, an A-Z’ has
twenty six A-Z ‘chapters’, each pair linked by a play on words, others are
written in the form of notebooks or diaries. ‘Incandescence’ features a
multitude of characters each of whom get to speak in first person. The best
advice with the results of these exercises is to ditch the exercises and write
the story. Adding to this are some annoying asides to readers. In ‘Fascination’
Edward tells us: ‘I’m five foot eleven (all right, five foot ten)’, and in ‘The
Pigeon’ Boyd describes the undersides of willow leaves as ‘glinting in the
sunshine like a flashing shoal of fish darting among weeds’ to have the
protagonist intrude that the simile is too complicated.

The best stories are those which
don’t use artificial devices. In ‘Varengeville’ a young boy is banished from
his mother’s house so that she can carry on an affair of which the boy is all
too well aware. The boy befriends an elderly artist, and develops a deeper
sense of belonging because of it. ‘A Woman on the Beach with a Dog’ is modeled
on Chekov’s Lady with the Lapdog, right down to the unresolved ending. If
the story lacks the emotional impact of the original it captures something of
the chance meeting after which two lives will never be the same. ‘The Pigeon’
is another, less successful pean to Chekhov, this time set in 19^th
century Russia. I found ‘Ghost of a Bird’ the most pleasing story in this
collection. It is set in France, in World War II, and a young soldier, Gerald, is
injured in a tank battle. As Gerald begins to piece his memory together Boyd
gives us a moving insight into his parents’ grief, and the young man’s
bewilderment. The language is plain:

‘It distressed him to see how
quickly he had forgotten everything, how quickly the residue of fresh
impressions was wiped away’

and apart from the diary format of the story the narrative
is conventional. The result is that we are able to experience something of the
feelings involved without the sense of being manipulated by the author’s sleight
of hand. ‘Ghost of a Bird’ is a genuinely affecting story. Boyd even manages to
ask questions about memory, but the story is neither didactic nor self
consciously clever, it is a simple tale well told.

This is a mixed collection, the
best stories evoking an unaffected response to common human experiences like
loneliness, grief and futility, others leaving you indifferent to the
characters and their fates, or even irritated by them. It strikes me that Boyd
needs a stronger editorial hand if he is to realize his potential as a writer
of short fiction.

© 2006 Tony O’Brien

Tony O’Brien is a short story writer,
and lecturer in mental health nursing at the University of Auckland, New
Zealand: a.obrien@auckland.ac.nz

Categories: Fiction