[In the following review, Maitland derides the plaintive tone and psychological density of the stories in Dreams of Dead Women's Handbags.]

Shena Mackay has an uncomfortably accurate and shrewd eye for the details of bourgeois life, and an appropriately shrewd and elegant style to tell us what she has seen. This is a combination that suits the satirist well and in Redhill Rococo, her last novel, she showed how well she could handle satire: hilarity without loss of compassion is a rare and lovely thing.

But it works less well in this collection of stories—because here Mackay is not, I think, trying to be funny, though too many sentences do stretch longingly towards a snappy, witty conclusion. Real pain and madness lurk within almost all these stories: the pain and madness of loneliness, isolation and failure. And there is something almost plaintive in the tone—as though the stories themselves, or at least the characters in them, know and fear that they may be laughed at and feel they don't deserve it. Are we expected to laugh at poor Miss Agnew, doomed, by the death of her woman lover, to live out her life despised, along with an odd group of other social exiles, on an upper story of a seaside hotel in ‘Where the Carpet Ends’? Or at the agony of a writer's loss of faith in her own talent in ‘The Thirty First of October’? Or at the fierce intensity and pyromanic despair of poor little Joe, misunderstood child, who finds herself a frail friendship with two artistic homosexuals in ‘All the Pubs in Soho’ (my favourite of this collection)?

Mackay compounds her problems of tone by taking a very firm hand and insisting, too much, on a rigorous social realism. Many of the stories—the title one, for example, or ‘The Most Beautiful Dress in the World’, in which the conflict between maternal love and creative self-fulfilment leads to the disintegration of the protagonist—end up by ‘explaining’ too much. As in the gothic novels of the early 19th century, everything has to have a clear and literal explanation; dream and imagination are clearly separated from the ‘real world’ and their own reality is thus denied, along with the imaginative capacity of the reader. I actually do not need to know whether the mayhem committed by the mother in ‘The Most Beautiful Dress’ really happened, and I certainly do not want to have my experience of her panic distanced by the unnecessary and clumsy intrusion of the police force.

Since, for most of Mackay's characters, imaginary life is central, crucial to their experience, it is almost mean of her to drag them continually back into social realism. Even in the most supernatural of the stories, such as ‘Perpetual Spinach’, where the insensitivity of some gentrifying yuppies towards their aged neighbours is appropriately punished, the ending is laboured lest the reader miss the point. The characters, the readers and the potency of the imagination itself: all deserve more respect.

So, despite the accuracy and the delicious prose, this collection left me uneasy: not only in the way that it is obviously meant to (have I looked hard enough at the lives of ‘ordinary people’? am I aware of the lurking depths, the strange kinks, the tangled pasts of these superficially dull folk?) but also in a more literary sense.

Can the structure of the traditional short story (which is what these predominantly are) with its lavish piling on of the social detail, with its deft ending which both explains and skews what has gone before, actually carry the emotional weight, the imaginative, psychological density that it is being asked to here? And the answer, here at least, is ‘not quite’.