2006 Edinburgh International Book Festival

The thoughts of small men

James Smith reports on a lively morning with Adam Thorpe

It wasn't until the reviews for Adam Thorpe’s new book were published that he realised all the stories in the collection were about so-called small men and their struggles with the modern world. Clever editing for sure, but also a reminder that the lot of the twenty-first-century male can be a confusing and disorienting one.

Eyes sparkling behind his schoolboyish round glasses, Thorpe relished reading from Is This The Way You Said? to the mid-morning audience in the Edinburgh Book Festival’s Spiegeltent, giving a bravura performance of comedic pauses and wicked characterisation.

Thorpe's new collection of stories sees him engagaing well and truly with the lunacy of the twenty-first century. Clearly no fan of the modern business world, he read 'Heavy Shopping'  - in which a businessman is forced to decide between staying at his work conference or rushing home to his wife and premature baby – with a fearful disdain for the boss who makes his subordinate’s decision so difficult.

 'In the Author’s Footsteps' was a jollier tale about one man's present-day attempt to follow the route of a Buckinghamshire footpath as described in a 1949 hikers' guide. Unsurprisingy, the rambler finds himself in the chilled foods section of Milton Keynes Asda, where once flourished "primroses and snowdrops under oaks and elms". Here, Thorpe’s interest in the past as a continuous present (see his novel Ulverton) surfaces, tinged this time with wry humour.

Thorpe's third extract, from the title story of the collection, beautifully describes a budding author's visit to his new editor at a large publishing house. Waiting nervously in the foyer, he recognises a world-famous novelist, looking considerably older and more jaded than her publicity photo. "She must have been rather beautiful, once: now she seemed suburban, elderly. She had a twitch, too: a little spasm of the neck. A faint whiff of spirits saddened the air between them." Reading aloud these wonderfully staccato sentences, he hade the most of his commas, colons and full stops, rhythmically pausing, looking about, and then moving on.

The characters in these stories are vividly drawn, yet characterisation tends not to be the starting point for Thorpe's writing. He begins with the germ of an idea or image, a flimsy structure which then goes awry. It is only at this stage that characters come to the fore to lead the story.

In fact, some of these stories have been, in the author’s words, ‘fermenting in the drawer’ for many years. (Bernard MacLaverty said the same about his new collection when he spoke at the festival, and it must be true for countless other writers.) By writing in 'layers' and looking at things from different perspectives, Thorpe amends his stories until he is completely satisfied with their complexity.

For him, the short story is a mood piece, retaining an air of incompleteness and mystery; in his opinion, it has more in common with a poem than a novel. This may be so, but the gusto with which Adam Thorpe performed his new short stories shows that he also believes in using comedy and finely-honed anger to make his point.

17 August 2006