[In the following mixed review, King notes the humor and poignancy of the tales collected in The World's Smallest Unicorn.]

As one of the most gifted contenders in the literary Olympic games, Shena Mackay has always struck me as being a sparkish, spunky sprinter rather than a patient, persistent long-distance runner. Her novels may at first seem slight, sometimes even insubstantial; but their specific gravity is so high that long after one has read them they still leave a dense residue in one's mind. Even her shortest short stories can, like those of Jane Gardam, be usually relied on to tell one far more about the turbulent passions and twisted motives of her characters than many a jumbo of a novel by a writer less concise and adroit.

In this latest collection [The World's Smallest Unicorn], many of these characters belong to the world either of entertainment or of books. But in those worlds their positions are nearly always humble, even humiliating. In ‘Crossing the Border’, one of the funniest and most poignant of the stories (Mackay's stories are usually both those things), a feisty young woman pays a visit to the Grimaldi Home for Retired Clowns, where her great-uncle, his undistinguished career long over, has been incarcerated. Sadly, she arrives too late, death having already visited him before her. His sole bequest to her is a pair of clown's shoes.

In another story, full of alert observation, ‘The Last Sand Dance’, Zinnia, married to a once successful television writer whom no one now wishes to employ, is an actress with an ‘unreconstructedly West End glamour about her’, who has not appeared on a stage north of Wimbledon for many years. The jangling relationship between her and her husband is beautifully adumbrated, with a mixture of tenderness and mockery. Of another character Mackay writes that he ‘fantasised about being a pop star until an audition for New Faces smashed his dreams’. In her fiction, people's dreams, particularly if they are of fame, all too often get smashed.

In one of the two dud stories in the book, ‘Death by Art Deco’—its satire of the literary world too crude and unforgiving, its dénouement too mechanical—the theme is the relationship, at first affectionate and mutually supportive but eventually doomed to disillusion and destruction, between an established woman author (her last novel is a remaindered Virago Classic, Mistletoe in a Dirty Glass), whose life and work are both entering a decline, and a young would-be one, full of ardour and hope. In the far better ‘The Day of the Gecko’ the aging editorial director of a publishing house and her sexually adventurous young assistant travel to Goa in vain search of a vanished author. The accelerating friction between the two women is skillfully realised, as is the exotic setting; and there is the added bonus of the presence in the Da Silva Guest House, where the women are lodging, of two old troupers, Jonty and Jilly, who have achieved fame as irascible husband and long-suffering wife in a dozen indistinguishable sitcoms.

Children, wise beyond their years and therefore even more cynical than their parents, also figure prominently. In the splendid title story, a pair of twin girls cruelly exacerbate the sense of defeat and shame of a man who returns, his job with a Hong Kong firm called The Pink Panda Stationery Company abruptly terminated, to sponge off his brother and the sister-in-law whom, many years before, he nonchalantly seduced.

Even the less successful of the stories remain a joy to read because of the way in which the style now buffets one into attention and now caresses one into delight. ‘Trainers like two dead pigeons on the carpet’; ‘her roots growing out until her hair looked like burnt toast spread with margarine’; ‘an umbrella like an injured fruitbat’: such similes at first make one think ‘How ludicrous!’ and then, immediately afterwards, ‘How absolutely right!’

Mackay writes of one of her characters that she ‘saw eternity in a plastic flower’. It is her own special gift to see eternity in what to other, less perceptive, less humorous and less compassionate writers might merely seem to be rubbishy ephemera. Hers is a talent to cherish.