Sarah Hall: The Beautiful Indifference: Stories

There are many ways to begin to think about what a good short story is or might be. Tight structure, inelaborate architecture, narrative propulsion or switchback or chasm, entrance and exit strategy, disturbance of the quotidian, experimental psychology, metaphysical miniaturism, a fun run for the soul’s voice, dose of pure biological world, an act of moderate civil or moral heresy. I don’t really know, I said to the gentleman questioner, sorry. This did not go down well. I looked like an avoider of difficult questions, which I suppose I was, though the evasion was not meant to be chary. Better might have been to give examples of stories by writers I admire (Mr. Salter, Faulkner, Kevin Barry, Tessa Hadley, to name just a few). That way I could have illustrated what I think a good story is or can be.

Like many unanswered questions, this one stuck in my brain. Not because I feel I’m not equipped to intuit and analyse — I trust that I can sense what a good story is, even if I can’t fully, unmetaphorically describe it. Some days I myself would like to fathom exactly what that golden, electrical, particle-reactor core is. Because the short story remains exceptional, doesn’t it? Radiant? Dangerous? It is a device of inordinate power. It’s easily as powerful as a novel, perhaps more active and potent than a novel, for its scope within strictures, its concentration, its resourcefulness in the face of austerity and minimal apparatus.

What I can say is that I love writing in the short form and have been doing so for as long as I’ve been writing novels. My work has a tendency toward the episodic, the cinematic, the disquiet of looking through the locked door’s keyhole, the flip side — all of which suits this fictional mode. I don’t claim mastery — I’d point to the previous list of names for that — but this collection has been ruthlessly cut and curated, honed to the pieces I feel achieve a certain standard. Of beauty, significance, catastrophe, eroticism, even epiphany, which some would argue is rare in life and therefore not relevent to craft: those moments when our strange, vexing, mutable existences momentarily come into focus.

The couple of years leading up to this book’s production were very challenging for me, and involved illness, loss, travel, and love, the kind of love that mortifies and elates, that creates a hyperreality. The safety nets come down. Suddenly everything is acute and consequential. You know the feeling. My response, my management, was a series of tales, not tales of me — I’m a reconstituter rather than a diarizer — but tales within which these matters feature. The plots reveal such, and on other levels there are signs too; in the landscape, in animal totems and ferality, in human priorities. Redness in a lake. A bolting horse. Hunting equating with loving. A speculative book about the end of the world. Survivals of the self, and assertions of living. In one of the stories, set in Mozambique, a woman notes that sometimes you find yourself in a situation, physical or emotional, where the extreme meaning of being, and of being mortal, that underlying sharpness, ruptures through the calm surface, obliterating the order we strive so hard to create. What occur are brief moments of messy honesty. Chaos passes. Darkness lifts or the sun finally sets. Life stabilises. But perhaps these are the times when we truly inhabit ourselves, when we are made manifest. Likewise, I suspect that is what a good short story is or can be.