"The Darkness of Wallis Simpson and Other Stories" by Rose Tremain

An audio book.

• In the title novella, a monologue by Simpson on her French deathbed, the old woman's lost track of time. She doesn't understand why her carers are angry at her for not remembering things, then angry when she recalls visiting Hitler. She recalls being a girl from Baltimore but doesn't recall what she's most famous for. She recalls a little man with blue eyes, the only man who really loved her. She hears voices outside, wanting to get in, to hear her story. I think it's too long, though there are excellent passages.
• "How it stacks up" - a father wonders what to do on his birthday. He goes to a restaurant with his family. They're all stock characters, which is fair enough. "Katy and the garden have something in common: they're both small, and it looks like they'll never be beautiful no matter how hard anyone tries". Nothing there for me.
• "The beauty of the dawn shift" - an East German armed border guard (who's against the West; he's into incest and shooting people) decides to head for Russia when the wall comes down. He dies of cold on a Polish freight train, a reminder of WW2. It's a fast-paced story.
• "Death of an advocate" - It's 1877. France. At the end the man dies on a train - "too early, hardly any leaves had fallen". But they'd fallen on the earlier picnic. I can't see anything of interest in the piece.
• "Nativity story" - An up-dated version. A couple find shabby accommodation after a car accident. The woman gives birth. They a given presents. No.
• "The over-ride" - Steffan, the son of a concierge, heard music from the Albi's apartment. Later he married, got a gas fitter's job. His wife died in a car accident.He gave up his job, helped his mother, and drank. Later Mr Albi left his wife (45) for a younger musician. The wife kills herself thanks in part to the son's boiler fix. The son now finally recovers his mental health - because there was no more music?
• "The ebony hand" - A childless aunt (41) in the fifties, Norfolk, raises her niece, Nicholina, 13, whose mother had died and whose father was in a mental home. She looks after her, gets a radiogram, seeks a husband for her. Nicholina prefers an exciting boy, Gregory, to Paul, a solid farmer's son. The aunt works in a shop where objects are displayed on a black hand. It means a lot to her - it's timelessness. When the shop shuts down, she asks to keep the hand but the shop owner says its too expensive. Nicholina's heartbroken (and pregnant) when Gregory leaves her. They're still visiting the mad father most weeks. They discover that Paul's become a mental home resident. The aunt goes to town, sees the hand in an antique shop. She buys it. It consoles her.
• "Loves me, loves me not" - A retired American is returning to England in 1985 to see the woman he'd met during the war and had planned to marry. After the war he'd returned to the States, found a house and awaited the woman's arrival at the dockside. She never arrived though her trunk did. She'd changed her mind at the last moment. He'd got over it in the end, and had married. In the London hotel, awaiting the woman, he suddenly decides to stay in his room rather than see her.
• "Moth" - The female neighbour of the narrator, a trailer-park resident, is left by her husband after the birth of their second child. He suddenly returns when it's discovered that the 2nd child has wings and can fly - i.e. a source of money.
• "The Cherry Orchard, with rugs" - Effeminate Darren, 34, is sometimes Diego, sometimes Daniella. He works in the carpet section of a department store. On the EuroStar to Paris, as Daniella, he starts talking to a teacher who's on his way to see a Peter Brookes production which uses carpets instead of scenery. They exchange aesthetic opinions. The teacher invites Darren to the play. After, in a hotel room, the teacher says "I can't do this" and leaves suddenly.
• "The dead are only sleeping" - Nell receives a call from her step-mother telling her that her father's died. She doesn't believe it. When Nell was 5 her mother suddenly died. Nell had been told she was "sleeping". She goes to her father's resting place (at a hospital) and asks the staff if he's dead for certain. It's likely that her father's behaviour (drinking, etc) had contributed to her mother's death. The story (like several in the book) lacks psychological authenticity to me.
• "Peerless" - I've read this before. An old man whose 2 kids have moved away has a wife who's a keen charity helper. He's invited to sponsor a penguin at a local zoo. He does so, because the penguin's called Peerless, the name of a boarding-schoolmate, his best friend (fey), who killed himself in the holidays. He visits the zoo. To cheer Peerless up he regularly gets ice and delivers it to the zoo to keep the pond cool.

Characters re-assess their lives in the light of someone's death (or their own impending death). There's dramatic irony, the characters seemingly unaware of what's clear to readers, but I don't think the characters need be quite so cartoonish. The voices are convincing enough. Maybe the stories are aimed at mainstream audiences. Maybe 3 of them are alright. Some of the others wouldn't normally be published, I feel.

Other reviews

• Stevie Davies (Rose Tremain's remarkable new short story collection maps a world of terminal decline, whose characters search for honourable closure to lives that have outlived themselves. ... The author practises a kind of aesthetic abstinence, denying herself the easy epiphanies that are the short story writer's stock-in-trade. ... Like a lamp, the lemon sheds weak lustre in the bleak moral landscape, one of a series of finely imagined objects that accumulate talismanic but ambivalent private value for Tremain's people: the precious oyster-shell in "The Nativity Story"; the glove-display hand in "The Ebony Hand"; Wallis's tiny hoard of jewels.)
• Simon Savidge (The Darkness of Wallace Simpson [] is one of the best short stories I have ever read.)
• Eliza Charlton
• Goodreads