In the title story ‘Runaway’, Carla is married to ill-natured, unlikeable Clark, high school dropout who manages to persuade Carla to lose her own ambitions and marry him. How frighteningly easy it was for Clark to do this - Carla has a desire to live an ‘authentic life’ different to the middle class comfort of her parents’ ambitions and happily sings the old ballad about the lady who falls in love with the gypsy rover; but this is Munro-land, where romantic notions can only be darkly ironic. She becomes afraid of Clark, his surliness, his simmering displeasure, and their day to day life full of small uneasiness piled on small uneasiness. She has been drawn into a particularly nasty sex game to please Clark – she fabricates a tale of molestation by her friend Sylvia’s husband because it excites Clark, and is horrified when he plans to use the story to blackmail Sylvia. Sylvia, who like everyone else detests Clark, offers Carla the opportunity to escape, which Carla does – but then she returns, drawn by the dark sexual thread which links her to Clark. Munro’s famous atmosphere of menace and things awful about to happen, is wonderfully evoked in the scene Clark has with Sylvia after Carla’s return. In a few lines of heart stopping dialogue, Clark menaces Sylvia into non-interference in future, just as he menaces Carla into acquiescence to his sordid fantasies. The reader is left fearing for Carla, but her complicity in what is bound to happen is made shockingly clear at the end of the story when she quite deliberately chooses not to recognise an act of malicious revenge by Clark. ‘Not knowing’ or ‘not seeing’ is a feature of Munro’s women.

Juliet is another misfit who appears in a trilogy of stories , ‘Chance’, ‘Soon’ and ‘Silence’. She is a classics scholar and suffers the penalty for her odd choice of subject. She is a freak to other teenagers, an object of mild disappointment to her parents who keep urging her to be popular and sociable. But this is impossible for Juliet:

“…in the town where she grew up her sort of intelligence was often put in the same category as a limp or an extra thumb.’

Even among male classicists, she is advised to get out and live, although they live an academic and cloistered existence quite happily. But ‘odd choices were simply easier for men’, she realises, and gets on with her half life – half academic, half the life of a female, never completely one or the other. Her relationships with men are difficult. She is part of the gaggle of‘unwanted girls’ at high school and goes on dates with boys she does not like where she struggles to be sociable and lively. She even manages to have a bleak and determined sexual encounter in a park, only to be told by the young man on the way home that she isn’t his type. So anxious is she to be accepted, that she does not think till later that he wasn’t her type either - it isn’t only in the matter of careers that men hold the prerogative of judgement and choice. However, Romance is on the way – she meets a man on a train, a man with an invalid wife. Together they study the stars – he names the constellations, she tells him the tales associated with them, in particular the tale of Andromeda, rescued by Perseus from the stake and the sea monster. A romance is born, sexual on his part, romantic on hers, a rescue of a kind, and when she visits him, and discovers his wife is dead and being buried that very day, the bargain is sealed. But the warning signs are there and she pays no need. This is a choice she makes. This man does not deceive her. While his wife was ill, he had two mistresses. When his wife is only just in her grave, he takes Juliet as a lover. She suspends judgement. She is too happy to be “claimed,” “assaulted by happiness,” as he bears down on her. And yet somewhere a warning bell rings : “How astonishing this is. How close to dismay.” But of course she ignores it.

The relationship turns out to be no more unhappy than anyone else’s and for some time she is actually quite happy. In ‘Soon’, when she visits her parents she is happy to receive the kind of acceptance as a new mother which she never received as a classicist. In this story, it is the relationship between Juliet and her parents which is explored and it must be the most painful part of the whole volume of stories. Juliet is a Daddy’s girl – male approval is what she seeks, what she has always sought. Her mother is an irritation, an interruption in the dialogue with her father. Again, in a few lines, Munro encapsulates the poignancy of this situation - mother makes an expression of love to her daughter, and daughter turns away without answering. Nothing much happens – no drama, no tears –but the scene is shockingly cruel.

In ‘Silence’, which is set years later, Juliet too has to face rejection by her own daughter whom she loves dearly. Munro uses the medium of an unsigned birthday card to symbolise this rejection and it is as brutal as a blow. Stoically, Juliet has to accept the situation – no one ever goes down under the weight of misery in Munro-land. Juliet continues to hope for a reconciliation some day ”as people who know better hope for undeserved blessings, spontaneous remissions, things of that sort.” This is as close to hope as any of Munro’s people can get.

All of the stories involve versions of memories of years before. In ‘Passion’ Grace remembers a moment in time: engaged to dull Maury, something she drifted into, she has an encounter with his alcoholic brother which changes her life, something she does on the spur of the moment. She does not judge whether the change was for good or ill. It merely happened. As Eric says in ‘Chance’ : it is only a different sort of life. In ‘Powers’, the narrator looks back over many years and traces the relationship between a friend with clairvoyant powers and the man the narrator warned her against marrying. Darkly ironic mood again – the clairvoyant could not see what was under her nose much less the dreadful future awaiting her.

Problems of identity feature in both ‘Tricks’ and ‘Trespasses’. ‘Tricks’ is the story of Robin, a cultured young woman from an uncultured small town who pays a visit once a year to the theatre to see a Shakespearean play. On this occasion, the play is the great love tragedy ‘Antony and Cleopatra.’ A series of mishaps causes her to make the acquaintance of a man she falls in love with. But there is a mystery. He cannot meet her again for a year. On the due date, she visits the theatre again, this time to see ‘As You Like It’ and then is ignored entirely by the man when she went to meet him. It is not for many years that she discovers there was a confusion not unlike that of the play she had seen. We are left to ponder the idea, so typically Munro, that life is neither a tragedy nor a romantic comedy where all ends well; that it is merely an exercise in stoical acceptance of chains of circumstance.

‘Trespasses’ features one of the most likeable characters in the book – Delphine, a waitress, incurably working class and rough edged. Lauren, daughter of a couple who like to think of themselves as progressive and modern (and oh, the dry wit exercised by Munro on their child rearing methods!), makes friends with Delphine – in fact is courted by Delphine in her clumsy way. Delphine, it turns out, is looking for a daughter she once surrendered for adoption and Lauren is left to fathom out the mystery of her identity through a tangle of lies and secrets revealed grudgingly by her parents. Tricks of memory used to assuage human longing and trespasses make for an uncomfortable read.

The collection is absorbing, full of the shock of the ordinary, and the discomfort of facing reality. Set against the blazing backdrop of the Canadian landscape, Munro has conjured up a world that is universal in its significance. She has said that this will be her last book – we can only hope that this is not so.

Marion Arnott lives in Paisley, Scotland. She was winner of the Phillip Good Memorial Prize For Women's Fiction 1998, CWA Short Dagger 2001 and shortlisted for CWA Short Dagger 2002. Work has appeared in Scottish Child, West Coast, Solander Magazine, Peninsula , QWF, Hayakawa Mystery Magazine (Japan), Books Ireland, Northwords, Chapman, Crimewave, and Datlow and Winding's Year's Best Fantasy and Horror volume 15. Her short story collection 'Sleepwalkers,' was published in August, 2003 by Elastic Press. To visit Marion's Showcase on this website, click here

© 2004 Laura Hird All rights reserved.