There’s something disarmingly low-key about James Lasdun’s writing, a hard-to-define tone that nevertheless draws the reader deep into the specific moment of each story.

He isn’t flashy (far from it), he doesn’t turn syntactical somersaults, and the plots of his stories are unremarkable. Likewise, the people who inhabit his fiction are ordinary individuals suffering the common problems of life – financial concerns, unwanted pregnancies, unwelcome attentions – but Lasdun’s precision with every word makes their concerns real and realistic.

Some short story collections benefit from being read over an extended period of time, one or two stories at a time. It’s Beginning to Hurt is exactly the opposite. Lasdun’s style initially seems cold (do we really care that the self-absorbed narrator of ‘An Anxious Man’ has lost a pile of money on the stock market?), but as we read on, our indifference falls away.

It is, in fact, the anxiety of Lasdun’s characters that is so compelling: a nervous man finds himself unable to emulate his womanising friend’s nightly success rate; a woman is troubled by her partner’s seething anger; a widower on the brink of a new life is brought up short by an apparently innocuous piece of information – ‘He was aware of something perilous in his own immobilised silence; that the longer it continued, the more he stood to lose.’

Fresh starts are hard to come by in other stories as well. A wealthy wine merchant’s marriages are seen through the eyes of a jewellery-store assistant who models different pieces for him over the years; a brother’s goodwill gesture towards his sister is thrown back in his face. And in ‘Totty’, a previously promiscuous divorcee’s past comes back to haunt her.

‘Totty’ also demonstrates Lasdun’s relish for picking apart the pampered, self-satisfied lives of the well-to-do. Occasionally he even allows us to feel a little bit sorry for them. Not often, though.

The strangest story in the book, ‘Annals of the Honorary Secretary’, would not be out of place in a JG Ballard collection. It is never specified precisely what it is that the circle of people meet to discuss or experience in the Kurwen’s north London home, but the effect of a newcomer among them is profound: ‘Ellen Crowcroft, most simply and perhaps most accurately, said that as she sat watching the girl, she had suddenly started to feel as if she were dying.’ This is spooky stuff, made all the more so by the matter-of-factness of tone in which it is told.

Enter, then, the mesmerising world of James Lasdun, and marvel at his mastery of the short story form.

It's Beginning to Hurt is published by Jonathan Cape

Reviewed by James Smith, Story website editor (April 2009)

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