Alice Munro

One Alice Munro short story has the power of many novels.

Nothing is wasted. Nothing is irrelevant. Every word glows. Munro is able to capture the shape and mood, the flavour of a life in 30 pages. She tells us what it is to be a human being. She is wholly without cliché. At the end of one of her stories you have to pause, catch your breath, come up for air. Alice Munro has done more than any living writer to demonstrate that the short story is an art form and not the poor relation of the novel.

Munro’s fictions are usually set in small-town rural Ontario, where she has lived for much of her life. Her characters often leave the confines of the country for an intellectual and creative existence in the city, find that they have become ensnared within an undesired domesticity, which forces them into pale versions of themselves, and then, in later life once more feel the urge to break free. Yet the recurrent and very personal themes of Munro’s fiction – the stirring of the creative impulse, the bohemian rejection of provincial anonymity and conservatism, the refusal to be bound by narrow definitions of womanhood, and the complexity of female sexuality – are not what make her work so remarkable. For that we need to look to her style. Munro’s way with form, the scattered chronology of her stories, captures the drift of our thoughts, the endless movement in and out of moments. A Munro sentence, beguiling in its lucidity, compelling in its precision, seductive in its simplicity, offers constant enchantment. Munro’s prose, without sentiment, yet suffused with a hard melancholy, has a composed, wry, crystalline grace. Take this, from 'Floating Bridge', in Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (2001): ‘what she felt was a light-hearted sort of compassion, almost like laughter. A swish of tender hilarity getting the better of all her sores and hollows, for the time given.’ Read that last sentence again. From the honest beauty of ‘swish of tender hilarity’ to the striking ‘sores and hollows’ to those final words: ‘for the time given.’ The time given contains multitudes.

Munro has talked about ‘the complexity of things, the things within things’. It is her natural ability to describe the ‘shameless, marvellous, shattering absurdity’ of life, to express it in just the right way, to capture it in all its endless, shapeless strangeness, which makes her so good. She has an acute sensitivity to the treasons, duplicities, evasions, snatched passions, tendernesses, compromises, commitments and pained avowals of human relationships. She teases the surface, until all that is hidden, all those tucked away pivots of a life, are revealed. In her stories there are no neat endings, no straightforward progressions, no character arcs. There is a detachment from the crude mechanics of bold brushstrokes. Munro’s palate is infinitely subtle, with modulations of tone and colour that unsettle, surprise and delight. Munro finds the extraordinary within the ordinary, and reveals life to be a layering of secrets and lies, a meshing together of disparate elements. She shows us that we can never truly know anyone. After the travelling salesman father has visited a women called Nora in 'Walker Brothers County' (with his two children in tow), the narrator comments: ‘my father does not say anything to me about not mentioning things at home, but I know, just from thoughtfulness, the pause when he passes the liquorice, that there are things not to be mentioned. The whiskey, maybe the dancing. No worry about my brother, he does not notice enough. At most he might remember the blind lady, the picture of Mary.’ This is note-perfect writing. Munro plays with our own lack of knowledge; we feel complicit in the need to share a secret we know nothing of. We assume that Nora is a former love of the narrator’s father, and yet we are given no confirmation of this, no specific reason why the father has decided to visit her. We are, like the narrator and her brother, in the dark. As a consequence this scene becomes far more poignant.

Munro's narrators are philosophical, melancholic, at an ironic distance from their own lives. In Lives of Girls and Women (1973), a collection of interlinked short stories, Del, unflinching in her examination of concealed motive, says: ‘I wanted to know. There is no protection, unless it is in knowing. I wanted death pinned down and isolated behind a wall of particular facts and circumstances, not floating around loose, ignored but powerful, waiting to get in anywhere.’ Del is the classic Munro narrator – a woman in opposition to her family, her home town, her upbringing, a woman seeking her own kind of order. Munro’s narrators have an eloquent intelligence, a controlled ferocity of spirit. They possess, at centre, a sense of disquiet, an amused despairing wonder at the knowledge of the way life is tainted by its brevity and unexpected twists. The Munro narrator is the voice in your head that will not be silenced.

Alice Munro is routinely spoken of in the same breath as Anton Chekov. She resembles the Russian master in a number of ways. She is fascinated with the failings of love and work and has an obsession with time. There is the same penetrating psychological insight; the events played out in a minor key; the small town settings. In Munro’s fictional universe, as in Chekhov’s, plot is of secondary importance: all is based on the epiphanic moment, the sudden enlightenment, the concise, subtle, revelatory detail. Another significant feature of Munro’s is the (typically Canadian) connection to the land, to what Margaret Atwood has called a ‘harsh and vast geography.’ Munro is attuned to the shifts and colours of the natural world, to life lived with the wilderness. Her skill at describing the constituency of the environment is equal to her ability to get below the surface of the lives of her characters.

Now in her mid 70s, Munro’s work has inevitably shifted focus of late. Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (2001) shows the effect of memories arriving as jolts to the present. There is the failure of mind and body and the constraints of loneliness. The final story, 'The Bear Came Over the Mountain', recently filmed as Away From Her by Sarah Polley, begins as a story about the onset of Alzheimer’s. With Munro’s sure command of detail, pace, and the incremental revelation of past incidents, it gradually becomes an incredibly powerful examination of betrayal and the many varieties of love.

The stories in Runaway (2005) are of trapped lives and missed opportunities, of dulled passions and the need for flight; they are among the most beautiful and haunting that Munro has ever written. There is a lingering sense of regret throughout this true and heartbreaking collection, and a resigned acceptance of that. Munro’s next book, The View From Castle Rock (2006), is a memoir that reads like a collection of stories, an emotional treatise on memory, and an attempt to find the pitch of the present in the distant past. It is an outstanding achievement, a characteristically intricate weaving of fact and fiction. Munro shows the pull of the past, exploring the pressing and urgent need to make our own personal myths as the drift of the years begins to narrow the future.

Everything in Alice Munro’s fiction is tinged with irony. There is the possibility of failure, hope, redemption and despair, but only the possibility, the suggestion. Nothing is ever fixed, nothing is closed off or closed down. It is in this treatment of the essential imperfection of life and its failure to conform to the quick of our fantasies, that Munro achieves greatness.

Garan Holcombe, 2008