Short Stories: One of the dangers, when a writer chooses to set a collection in a particular field, is that thematic echoes will become repetitive. John Murray, a medical doctor by trade, has opted to draw his first collection of stories from the world of science and medicine, placing them in India, Australia, the Congo, the Himalayas and the United States, writes John MacKenna.
For someone who casts his geographical net so wide, Murray produces a book that is beautifully quiet and intimate. The stories reek of the sights and sounds and smells of Indian slums, American hospitals and bleak mountain peaks, yet at the heart of each is an individual faced with the dilemma of choosing between truth and surface reality. Murray takes us through backstreets, along riverbanks and out to sea, but the journeys wind slowly down to flashes of integrity, to choices.
In 'All the Rivers in the World', Vitek Kerolak, a man in search of his runaway father, realises that life hinges on "just a few key moments. When you boil it down, it is all about fifteen minutes here and fifteen minutes there, the moments when you are really tested, when what you do will make a difference". As we discover in life, so we discover in these stories. Those 15-minute epiphanies don't arrive with drumrolls and parting seas, rather they come stumbling uncertainly.
The alcoholic narrator in the title story carries a secret with him, the facts of his young sister's death are never clarified, and he finds himself with a lifetime of loose ends, married to a woman whose "decision to become a neurosurgeon was partly an attempt to control the surrounding world, which she sees as unmanageable. She has buried herself so far in her knowledge of details that she cannot properly feel what is happening in her own life".
While there are inevitable echoes of setting in Murray's world of science and medicine, there are other echoes, too. In 'White Flour', Joseph travels to Bombay to visit his father, a doctor who has fled there to escape unhappiness and to work with the destitute. In a moment of great tenderness, the years of separation are quietly packed away:
He turns awkwardly towards Joseph and grasps him by both shoulders, as if preparing to push him to the ground. It is only at the last moment that Joseph realises that his father is hugging him, pulling him into a gangly embrace. He is held there, pressed into the bony ribcage, enveloped by the smells of camphor and curry, and is so surprised that the kiss, when it comes, is as inexplicable as a moth, a soft winged creature, striking his cheek on a dark night.
The qualities in most of Murray's characters are also their flaws. Danny Dalton, the central character in 'The Carpenter Who Looked Like a Boxer', is a caring man whose gentleness is his undoing. Deserted by his doctor wife, he cares for his two children, cares that he is hearing noises in the walls of his house or in his head, cares about what he has lost. He looks at family pictures and thinks: "They looked right in the photographs. Just the four of them, faces pointed upward, whipping hair and glinting cheeks. He thought that even after she had left and gone."
Murray is at his most powerful and profound when he's at his simplest, when the echoes reverberate once or twice and then are lost forever, and in almost every story in this collection he manages that simplicity and that profundity.
John MacKenna's current book is Shackleton: An Irishman In Antarctica (Lilliput), co-written with Jonathan Shackleton. His play, The Woman At The Window, will be premièred in October by Meeting Lane Theatre Company with Paula Dempsey playing the 18th-century Quaker diarist, Mary Leadbeater
A Few Short Notes on Tropical Butterflies. By John Murray, Viking, 274pp, £14.99