A Complete Success: Stories by Colette Paul review: 'a real joy'

It opens with three first person stories: quirky and at first bleakly comic, they are told by a young, listless woman with a rather preposterous boyfriend. Workless, friendless, living in a house next to a pensioner whose bird feeding encourages rats, she feels adrift from the world around her. For all that, she sees things with devastating clarity, not least that she has landed herself with a grumpy know-it-all obsessive “who never has a mixed feeling” and who is hardly overjoyed by news that she is pregnant.

When she does have a baby, even though she doesn’t want to remind him - or herself - of his past ambivalence, the thought remains at the edge of her consciousness, “like a shoebox on top of a wardrobe”. That’s a neat, relatable simile and one a lesser writer would use to end the story. But it’s too showy for that: much better to round off the story on an emotion rather than a clever phrase, and Paul does just that. The wry observations of the first two stories disappear in a fug of maternal love as the couple adjust to the sheer strangeness of their first day in charge of a new life.

Endings are the hardest thing to get right in a short story. Beginnings are infinitely easier: writers can take whatever jumping-off point they want. Here, Paul’s range from a 62-year-old woman who has just been left by her husband and realises she hasn’t a clue how to decorate her flat to two teenage supermarket workers meeting on the bus (“I’m in cold meats”) and vaguely lusting after Keith in fruit and veg.

A rough guide to the effectiveness of an ending is how long you pause on that last full stop. In “Jeffrey”, Elaine is a woman on the cusp of old age who has lived for decades in the shadow of an assertive husband. The only thing they really ever had in common was a 15-year-old dog now literally on its last legs. Pouring on the pathos, Elaine’s new beau probably expects sex the next weekend they go away for the first time, but as she looks at rolls of fat on her back and her bra straps cutting into her shoulders, she shudders at the thought of intimacy. Meanwhile, her dog Jeffrey is obviously dying and she realises she had better tell her ex because he did at least love him. And she knows where he’ll be: at his mother’s in Largs for her birthday, probably with his new, younger girlfriend.

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Land the story from there, and most writers would think they already have all the ingredients they need. Paul doesn’t. In her short fiction, there is always some other strand going off at a tangent, and so when Elaine takes Jeffrey out on what might well be his last walk, she really wants to avoid having to chat to her crime-obsessed neighbour. While that in itself is a move away from the predictable, Paul moves the story further away still. Back home, Elaine lies next to Jeffrey on the bed “in that half-dreaming state where all the people who crowd your thoughts are both predictable and strange and you cannot tell where you start or they end. The moon shone quietly through the trees, giving nothing away.”

That, to me, is a story that has earned its ending. Somehow, this has to be both a surprise and inevitable, which is of course a contradiction in terms and explains why a good short story collection - which should also, naturally, have both stylistic and thematic range - is so hard to find. The 14 stories here - half told in the first person, half in the third - mostly do this. A complete success? Fiction doesn’t deal in perfection. A real joy to read, all the same.

A Complete Success: Stories, by Colette Paul, Batis, £13.99

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