Robert Shearman’s first collection of short stories Tiny Deaths was a disconcerting and unsettling collection in which elements of fantasy were interwoven with the real world, so that the human narratives contained within each story were almost subliminal. While the reader’s attention was taken by bizarre and unusual goings on, business as usual in the form of everyday conflicts and foibles carried on. Love Songs for the Shy and Cynical takes up where Tiny Deaths left off. If anything, Shearman has been emboldened by his first success, and he’s not going to let the reader off the hook with a more realist approach to his writing. His latest collection contains seventeen stories, or is it eighteen? One story, The Hidden Story, is listed in the index, but doesn’t appear in the book. We can’t even read the contents page before Shearman is up to his tricks of pulling the rug of reality out from under us. Some readers might find this irritating, but they would be well advised to persist, Shearman has much in store.

The theme of this book is love: the unpredictable and tortured relationships that people develop seemingly in contrast to either their best interests, or something as ordinary as a quiet life. From the opening story Love among the Lobelias the ordinary becomes enmeshed in the extraordinary. Love among the Lobelias is the story of a writer whose success contains the seeds of his undoing. It revisits the Christian narrative explored in the title story of Tiny Deaths, this time exploiting the mass appeal of the romance. Other stories include elements of the grotesque, for example a rabbit that grows wings (Roadkill), and a beating heart in a Tupperware container (Pang). These plot devices are the sort of thing that normally would interrupt suspension of disbelief, but Shearman breezily overrides such concerns with fast-paced stare-you-down narrative that just carries right on as if there’s nothing unusual happening. You get to the end of the story with the narrative intact, and wondering how Shearman has swept you along with his tale of the bizarre.

The stories cover many common situations, with the most commonly recurring theme being the strained long term relationship. In Luxembourg the entire country goes awol for a period of time, allowing protagonist Colin a fortuitous opportunity to abandon his unhappy marriage. When the country reappears explanations are in order. These are no different than the explanations required when any couple face up to their failing love, but Shearman has managed to lose a whole country where most people lose only a few months salary and a certain amount of face. In Your Long, Loving Arms the issue is the effect of unemployment on a relationship. The story takes on a Pythonesque element as redundant engineer Steve develops a new career as a tree. The theme of the long term relationship returns again in Crumble, with a woman’s successive fallings in love with the same man. In This Creeping Thing Susan’s cat becomes the focus of her love, and for an extended fantasy that only ends later in her adult life. But as in Luxembourg while the reader is elsewhere occupied with strange goings on, a real human drama is playing out.

Towards the end of this collection Shearman the author speaks directly to his readers with what is perhaps an exegesis of his literary theory. Not about Love features a protagonist who has been nominated for a short story award, affording Shearman the opportunity to expound his views on literature and the contemporary position of the author. But cunning devil that he is, Shearman also uses this framework to explore love between father and son, and to return to the theme of the long term relationship. The father-son relationship has already been covered in the At the Crease but in Not about Love Shearman gives it another go while also picking the scabs off literary jealousy.

If Shearman were a painter, his work would take on elements of the grotesque and the naïve, perhaps like Picasso, using primitive depictions to make a point without being weighed down by conventional forms. A naïve reader could be forgiven for being so distracted by the elements of the naïve and the grotesque that they miss the universal message of these stories. It is perhaps a moot point as to whether Shearman can persist with his fantastical style and still retain readers whose interest is in the underlying human narratives. Love Songs for the Shy and Cynical is another strong collection from a writer determined to make his own mark and find his own voice. Shearman succeeds in forging an amalgam of the ordinary and the bizarre. These are stories that will resonate, disconcert, and perhaps even haunt you.

© 2010 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