Madame Zero

Sarah Hall

Faber & Faber, £12.99

Review: Alastair Mabbott

SHE’S been Booker-nominated for her novels, and this is Sarah Hall’s second collection of short stories, following up 2011’s acclaimed The Beautiful Indifference. The nine stories gathered together here showcase her versatility, and the ease with which she can delineate both interior and external landscapes – as in Wilderness, when a Yorkshire woman who has moved to South Africa to be with her boyfriend realises that he’s a dead loss after all, and experiences vertigo in more than one sense on a perilous railway viaduct.

The opening story, Mrs Fox, already the winner of 2013’s BBC National Short Story Award, is a classic piece of magical realism. Told from the point of view of a confused and distressed husband, it shows his wife metamorphosising into a fox before his eyes, and his ultimately doomed attempts to incorporate her, in her new form, into their old domestic surroundings.

That’s not the only story that lingers in the memory long afterwards. Even in a collection that maintains a very high standard, some inevitably stand out more than others, such as Case Study 2, a report on a 12-year-old boy who has no experience of the world outside the commune in which he was raised, and is put into the care of the social services when it’s discovered that his health is suffering. His skewed idea of himself as an individual, his persistent use of the collective nouns we and us, are such a challenge to his care worker that she finds her ability to cope with the job slipping.

Later, His Ghost presents a form of climate change we haven’t seen before: a world constantly buffeted by winds so fierce that 90mph gales are considered mild weather, and anyone brave enough to go outside is in danger from flying debris. Hall’s narrator fights his way through abandoned and half-destroyed houses looking for a very specific Christmas present.

All her narrators are distinct and well-defined, from the young girl Jem, whose mother works in a hospital mortuary and who is trying to come to terms with the mauling of a baby by a dog in her street, to the surgeon in Theatre 6, who has to deal with a pregnant woman whose baby can’t be saved, which, under the political strictures of the time, is a “hot potato” medical staff would prefer to avoid.

The undercurrents of sensuality implicit in Hall’s prose finally swell into a powerful eroticism in the concluding story, Evie, in which the only hope for a stale marriage appears to be the wife’s surrender to the deepest and darkest urgings of her libido. Her husband, narrating, is conflicted, persuaded to go along with her wishes despite his misgivings about the potential consequences and his own guilty enjoyment.

Hall distinguishes herself across an extraordinary range of stories, in full command of a protean style which adapts itself easily to each situation and narrator. Her prose, which can seem both understated and lushly evocative at the same time, haunts and sometimes unsettles.