[In the following review, Mars-Jones offers a mixed assessment of the stories in Dreams of Dead Women's Handbags, asserting that Mackay's “faults are intermittent, her virtues—her eye, her inventiveness—constant.”]

Moving as it does from the sombre to the absurdly trivial without becoming unambiguously comic, the splendid title of Shena Mackay's new collection [Dreams of Dead Women's Handbags] well represents the tonal range of the book. Sometimes she invokes the simplicities of melodrama or pathos, sometimes she transforms them at the last moment into some more sophisticated compound.

The title story is unusual in falling off from the eerie confidence of its opening: “It was a black evening bag sequined with salt. … This image, the wreckage of a dream beached on the morning, would not float away; as empty as an open shell, the black bivalve emitted a silent howl of despair; clouds passed through its mirror.” In the story, the dreamer—a writer of mystery novels—imagines the dream to be a fiction-germ stirring, and waits for it to root itself in a plot or a cast of characters. Mackay's parallel attempt to derive a story from the dream produces some fine passages of surrealistic unease, as the mystery writer encounters minor madness and coincidence on her way by train to a reading of her work, but lapses into an almost wilful baldness when the dream turns out to be a memory of the writer's innocent killing of her parents as a child—not the sort of thing that even the most professionally productive unconscious could mistake for the first glimmerings of Detective Inspector Hartshorn's next case.

The short story is in many ways an unforgiving form, which calls like any tricky recipe for careful regulation of temperature and timing. But a story can also be a salvageable souffle, whose sagging texture can be restored by a gust of invention even on the way to the table. An example is the story “Violets and Strawberries in the Snow”, an account of an alcoholic ex-writer spending Christmas in a mental hospital, which is almost pure cliché throughout. The writer is visited by his three daughters, who put a brave face on things until one of them inadvertently sums up the situation with the words, “Satsumas are horrible this year.” After their visit the writer sits down to write a story with that title: “It would not be very good, he knew, but at least it would come from that pulpy, sodden satsuma that was all that remained of his heart.” This is Mackay at her most over-explicit, her least respectful of the balance that is struck in any story between the said and the unsaid.

But the story is saved by her manipulation of her own more oblique title phrase, first when the daughters enter: “they came in, smelling of fresh air and rain, with unseasonal daffodils and chocolates, like children, he thought, in a fairytale, sent by their cruel stepmother up the mountainside to find violets and strawberries in the snow”. There is a piercing poignancy in the way the character sees his children's visit more easily in terms of the fulfilment of a bizarre quest than as a natural expression of feelings.

Then, after they have left, the phrase recurs with its terms reversed, as the character sees in memory “his children smiling and waving at the door, their resolute backs as they walked to the car concealing their wounds under their coats, forgiving and brave, and carrying his own weak and dissolute genes in their young and beautiful bodies. Violets and strawberries in the snow.”

Most of these stories are brief, little more than ten pages. “All the Pubs in Soho” is by some way the longest and the most substantial. It tells the story of summer 1965 as it affects eight-year-old Joe, bullied and ignored at home, who finds something like friendship with Arthur and Guido, a couple who move into a cottage in the village. There is nothing about a child's point of view likely to defeat a writer of Shena Mackay's quality, but she seems reluctant in general to commit herself—either to fully inhabiting a character's point of view or to maintaining a fixed distance from it—in a way that hampers this particular story. The first paragraph, for instance, describes with an adult's aesthetic scrupulousness (flowers resembling “blue and copper velvety kitten's faces freaked with black”) Joe's misinterpretation of the words “those bloody pansies”, which refer in fact to Arthur and Guido. Since Joe's age has yet to be revealed, the effect is curiously irrelevant and confusing.

There is more to be revealed about Joe than age. Joe is actually Josephine, but refers to herself—and is referred to by the narrative voice—as a boy. Arthur and Guido guess this secret before the reader is likely to do so. Joe's resentment of her gender and the limitations it imposes is focused on her academic future, since the school her parents have chosen for her has a uniform which will prevent her from equivocating. She will be fatally a tomboy in a skirt.

The story builds to a climax as the school term approaches, and as Arthur and Guido's stay in the village comes to an abrupt end. But along the way Shena Mackay produces some of her few clumsy sentences:

The child from a house where a veneer of anxiety lay on every surface like dust, where at any moment a bark might rip up comics and scatter toys, where a fist thumping the table might make cups leap in fear vomiting their contents on to the tablecloth, just as Joe had once been sick when his father caught the side of his head with his knuckles and where Mummy's forehead wrinkled like the skin on cocoa and her chin puckered in fear and placation, expected every domestic disclosure between two adults to degenerate into a battle in which by being co-opted to one side, he was considered the enemy by the other, and so always ended as the loser whoever else was in power when a truce was called.

Even this disastrously rambling sentence is not a ruin but a ramshackle, uninhabitable mansion that could easily be subdivided into a number of splendid flats. Shena Mackay's faults are intermittent, her virtues—her eye, her inventiveness—constant. They give a reliable pleasure.