Books of the Month

'Runaway' by Alice Munro

Alice Munro is one of those writers who's hard to pin down. I know I love her work, for instance, but often find it hard to say precisely why. In the introduction to her short story collection Runaway, Jonathan Frantzen suggests that this very trickiness might have contributed to her not being as widely read and acclaimed as she should be. 

What I can say though is that few people are as good as Munro when it comes to capturing the sense of a whole life in a few pages. Short stories are traditionally moments of epiphany, and Munro pulls those off with aplomb, but her work is deeper, richer, more expansive than most. I've always thought that fiction lovers who claim they don't like short stories would have no problem with Munro, because her stories have all the weight and complexity of little novels. 

This collection is told through the eyes of several women at different stages in life (and sometimes, within or across stories, at different stages in their own lives), dealing with different but echoing challenges: lost children, lost homes, running from or towards something, betrayal. The title story features an older woman who helps her young neighbour escape from her unhappy marriage. Only things don't quite turn out the way either of them thought they might. 'Chance', 'Soon' and 'Silence' all feature Juliet, a woman who seems to manage to spend most of her life not really belonging. Yet taken together they still feel, appropriately, like three separate, significant episodes, rather than a novella. Munro's skill is in linking key moments throughout a life, and increasingly in this collection, looking backwards at those key moments with the clearer - though not necessarily happier - eye of experience.

Susan Tranter

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