The Little Black Book of Stories by A.S. Byatt is a collection of short stories in which the characters and settings are slightly twisted. Tales of wonder and the bizarre that masquerade as reality for the rest of the world. There are five tales in all and range from the amazing to the tragic.
"...The two little girls looked at each other, and took each other's hand. Speechlessly and instinctively they crouched down behind a fallen tree-trunk, and trembled, as the thing came into view..."
In The Thing in the Forest, during the war years young children in England are sent away from the cities to the relative safety of rural areas. Safe from falling bombs but not from forgotten creatures that still roam the deep forests. Three young girls enter the forest and only two come out.
"...He thought, I belong to a religion which worships the form of a dead or dying man..."
In Body Art, a young doctor meets a truly starving artist decorating the halls of the hospital he works in. Learning of her painful and harsh past he offers her refuge and in one week alters their lives forever.
"...She quickly lost this transient lifelike-ness, and became waxy and peaked. Ines, who had been the younger woman, became the old woman in an instant..."
In A Stone Woman, Ines buries her mother and then falls gravely ill. After the surgery to make her well she realizes that she is beginning to change. That what had been flesh and blood is changing to stone and crystals. As she begins to become something out of legend.
"...Every year they wrote melodrama. They clearly needed to write melodrama. He had given up telling them that Creative Writing was not a form of psychotherapy. In ways both sublime and ridiculous it clearly was, precisely, that..."
In Raw Material, a writer teaching Creative Writing to an evening class happens upon one student who simply writes the truth. Vignettes of what passes in her life. Encouraged by this he shares with the whole class only to have the work harshly criticized. It is only later, when a dark and violent moment becomes reality that the class finds the truth worth writing about.
"...Mrs. Bright watched James with approval, as he came to the end of the hair dressing. The pinning up of the fat coil, the precise insertion of thick steel hairpins. And finally, the attachment of the crisp pink ribbon. A sweet colour, fresh. A lovely colour, she said, as she always said.
"Yes," said James.
"You are a real kind man," said Deanna Bright. The person in the chair plucked at the ribbon..."
The final tale, The Pink Ribbon is the story of James, an elderly man who in his final years is caretaker to his wife. Who's dementia is incurable. One late night, James opens his door to a distress young woman and in saving this young woman, knows that it is up to him to save another.
The Little Black Book of Stories is very hard to put into a category. It is not horror or fantasy but each of these tales places its characters in situations that go beyond the norm. They are in some true sense morality tales. But to whom. The characters? The reader? Or perhaps the world around all of us. There are lessons in each of the stories. The ability to forget and pretend that darkness does not exist in The Thing in the Forest as the two oldest girls leave the forest without a word as the child that was with them is gone forever. In Body Art, the life of a newborn hangs in the balance between two completely different people who neither is ready to care for it. A Stone Woman who changing is handled with the stoic and hard heart that is already changed inside of her. Is Raw Material an indictment on today's reading world that wants the fantastic and violent over the everyday truths they live in?
A.S. Byatt brings all of these to light with the lyrical prose she is already so well known for.
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