That said, Kirstin Zhang’s ‘The Enemy Within’ is a worthy winner, more memorable than the others. Zhang doesn’t show McClure Smith’s wonderful gift for language, but she does give us a story that is very much rooted in ordinary human experience. Set in Indonesia, it follows Akbar whose wife has kicked him out of bed because he won’t buy her a new fridge. Having decided he wants a dog, he finds three abandoned puppies, one of which is still alive. He can’t take it home because his wife won’t allow it in the house and he’s not exactly flavour of the month with her right now. ‘The Enemy Within’ is well written, subtle, and the characters are likeable, easy to identify with.

Last year’s collection was edited by Jackie Kay. This year, it’s Janice Galloway. Like Kay before her, Galloway gives us an introductory essay on the short story. It’s interesting to read different writers’ views on the form. Readers will not always find themselves agreeing with the statements made.

The short story comes in many forms. Unfortunately in ‘Secrets’, the styles are not different enough to benefit the collection. There seems to be less variety this year. There’s also fewer stories on offer - thirteen to be exact, plus another three specially commissioned from Jackie Kay, Bernard MacLaverty and Ali Smith. The commissioned stories are good, though not outstanding.

There is an international element to this collection. Andrew Alexander’s ‘Tower of Babel’ is set in Baghdad. A Westerner is destroying documents and files before he has to escape the city. Meanwhile the Americans mistakenly shell a hotel housing many Westerners and pull down a statue of Saddam Hussein. Lesley McDowell’s ‘Dear Anne’ is set in Amsterdam. It doesn’t take long for the reader to work out that the characters are Anne Frank and her family in the secret annexe. The story is told from the point of view of “Kitty”, Anne’s diary and alter ego. A fifteen year old boy shoots a dog in Derek Robertson’s ‘A Softer Devil’, which has a US location. Meanwhile, Sylvia G Pearson’s ‘Wheels’ is set in Soweto and Johannesburg and follows Sipho, a strike breaker. He needs to work to support his family, but an opportunity is about to present itself.

John Aberdein is the only one of last year’s anthology contributors to make it into this year’s collection. The styles of the two stories are very similar, with a heavy emphasis on dialogue. It couldn’t be described as a cinematic style since cinema is primarily a visual medium, and the visual element is perhaps the least present in Aberdein’s writing. In ‘Imprint’, the story that appears in ‘Secrets’, there is an extended prose intro, but the dialogue eventually takes over, with only minor details on thought and action included thereafter. It’s an interesting style, but it does have drawbacks. It’s a bit like a film shot mostly in close up so that the viewer isn’t always sure where the characters are because of an absence of wide shots. It’s also a somewhat claustrophobic style, which keeps things focused inwards on character interaction. That said, ‘Imprint’ is a good story.

In ‘Outside Broadcast’ by Thomas Brackenbury the narrator suffers a bout of sleep paralysis, during which God comes to sit on his bed. God is a woman, and she makes a pass at him during their conversation on the question of souls. Nicholas McGregor’s ‘The Martha Day Affair’ is written in classic American noir language, with a private investigator narrator. However, there's more to this story than first appears. Frances Watt’s ‘Over The Counter’ takes place in a pharmacy. Ewan Gault’s ‘The Beast’, meanwhile, is written in dialect. Joanna Lilley’s ‘The Accents of Birds’ was one of the best stories. A young girl is going blind and her mother wants to get her into a special school. Someone from the school comes to assess them, but he too is blind. Lynda McDonald’s ‘Pandora’ also features a little girl, but this time she is the focal character. She has a mermaid doll, Pandora, to whom other people tell their secrets. Anne Morrison’s ‘Gorilla Rock’ also centres on children. They find an eel and show it to a holiday maker in a caravan park. Thinking it’s a snake, the woman is terrified.

There are so few short story collections published in the UK, and the situation in a smaller country like Scotland is even worse. ‘Secrets’ is worth reading, the writing is good, and some of these writers may go on to make a better name for themselves. Although the collection is not supposed to be about Scotland, per se, or representative of the country, the blurb on the back of the book claims that the anthology is “a clear indicator of the wealth of talent emerging in Scotland today.” I would disagree. That seems more true of the last collection than this one. A number of stories in ‘Secrets’ are not only set in other countries, but are completely from the perspective of people from those countries. They’re not about Scots interacting with the wider world. As for the Scottish stories, they often seem to be focused on children, or take place within domestic or narrow landscapes. To put it another way, the stories were either completely disengaged from Scotland, or Scottish, but inward looking. There was little evidence of Scotland as a multi-racial society, nothing about the plight of asylum seekers or the experience of New Scots, and the Scottish diaspora too were generally absent. This book seems less representative of Scottish writing than the last collection. I’d be curious to know what the other stories were like, those that didn’t make it to the final line up.

Kara Kellar Bell is a film and media graduate from the West of Scotland, with a passion for European novels, French films, silent cinema, and Brazilian music (everything from Daniela Mercury and other pop stars through to bossa nova). As a writer, she likes to have room to move around creatively, so she’s not located in one genre. She writes realism and also stories of a more fantastic nature, usually grounded to some extent in the real world. She also takes delight in writing across the sexual spectrum, and as a bisexual, considers it important to remind people that things are not always black and white, either/or, in sexuality or in gender. For a selection of Kara’s writing on the Showcase section of this site, click here

© 2005 Laura Hird All rights reserved.

---