Total - Rebecca Miller

  

A collection of short stories is always a treat but even more so under the fluent pen of Rebecca Miller. This collection is diverse, yet common threads run through all the stories - intimacy, love with its many confusions as experienced by people from various walks of life, mostly women, although She Comes to Me boasts a lone, male protagonist.

I found the stories to have a very visual quality which I suppose is not surprising given Miller’s cinematic background yet they had a distinct “literary“ feel also. They are more than mere storytelling for the prose is evocative and the characterisations succinct and apt. You feel that nothing is wasted, no words no punctuation. There is as much and as little as is needed. The perfect recipe for an immersive read.

The title story is faintly dystopian in its intent perhaps yet it remains firmly entrenched in our contemporary world with perhaps an insidious warning against our device devotion. It also goes beyond that to offer reflections on  mother-daughter relationships in a powerful and striking way.

While I was reading the collection I also had the feeling of what I call the “Patricia Highsmith“ effect. That strange unsettling, unnerving sense of things just out of kilter, off balance, close but not quite normal. And in all the stories there are people you think you almost know, characters with recognisable traits and yet there is an intangible darkness that pervades them, tensions, maybe ever so slight, but they are there which I think contributes to the sense of being a little off centre. It makes the collection very compelling.

I found the collection unputdownable. Not in the sense that one has with a crime or a thriller novel but with that unspeakable pleasure one gets from reading good writing and not wanting it to stop.

My thanks to Canongate Books for a gifted copy.