[In the following review, Brownrigg views Mackay as a talented short story writer and touches on the key thematic concerns of the stories in The World's Smallest Unicorn.]

A common, self-deprecating wisdom holds that the English (with the acknowledged exception of V. S. Pritchett) are not much good at short stories; that the nation has produced no master of the form with the calibre of Chekhov or Raymond Carver. A. S. Byatt went some way to correcting this gloomy picture in her rich anthology compiled for Oxford last year. There, she put forward a convincing argument that English writers have worked against the taut, “well-crafted” model of the short story. The best English stories, Byatt claimed, “pack together comedy and tragedy, farce and delicacy, elegance and the grotesque”.

This is an apt description of the work of Shena Mackay, who may be claimed for the Scots but who in her themes and settings is predominantly English, and increasingly metropolitan. (Born in Edinburgh, Mackay was brought up and educated in Kent.) Since the early 1980s, Mackay has produced several acclaimed collections of stories, pursuing the form with the same cool care and strange intensity she has brought to novels like Dunedin (1992) or The Orchard on Fire (1996). Her stories are dark, compelling excursions, and they cut with an edge that is distinctive to Mackay: an edge of humour and hostility that startles and unnerves, even as it amuses.

Some writers use the story collection strategically, to build a world: one reads through a volume of Raymond Carver or Alice Munro with an urgency based on the compulsion to understand a complete fictional environment. Mackay operates quite differently. There is unity neither in this collection as a whole, nor in each individual story. Mackay darts and dashes, sampling stark realism and gaudy fantasy; her narratives start and stop, and start again. She moves from Sheldon's Silver and Antiques in early 1960s Chancery Lane to a Home for Retired Clowns in Kent; from a lost expat returning from Hong Kong, to a hopeful publisher seeking romantic and literary salvation in Goa. Mackay's short fiction has been likened to a junk-shop window, and it is a fitting image; busy with objects, jewellery, clothes and an encyclopaedic range of plants, her stories are cluttered with material—with, to borrow Byatt's phrase on Sylvia Townsend Warner, the “thinginess of things”. Scotland appears briefly in a couple of stories—generally as a place people leave—but most are set in London. Within the capital itself, Mackay travels widely, taking in tree-sheltered terrace houses and a luxurious Sloane Square home; visiting club bores in the West End and well-off parents who reside in “one of those parts of London that thinks itself a village”. Mackay has a grim lyricism when conveying urban bleakness, and the south London in several stories is alive with a wonderful damp gloom. One of the collection's best stories, “The Index of Embarrassment”, has a gay nephew visiting his misanthropic uncle, whose great labour is compiling the index of the title, a comprehensive catalogue of song lyrics and clips, jokes and clichés. Uncle Bob experiences a malicious satisfaction at a neighbour's suicide in this bleary suburb, and his nephew tries to protect the grieving mother from Bob, whose “sharp nose would sniff out the loneliness masked by her rather shrill perfume”.

Mackay is frequently drawn to encounters between old and young. At her most sympathetic, she gently teases those on both sides of the generational divide, vividly chronicling the expat uncle's bewildered appreciation of his teenage nieces, a mother's jealousy of her son's Goth girlfriend, and, most movingly, the cross-generational encounter in “Trouser Ladies”, in which an ageing journalist, Beatrice, dines with the daughter of her dead best friend. (The younger lesbian has intuited Beatrice's lifelong passion for her own late mother, and that unspoken empathy warms their meal.) At Mackay's brittlest, the old become pathetic and the young merely predatory. In “The Day of the Gecko”. Allie, a publisher, takes her PA, Tasha, along to Goa on her wistful search for a vanished author, but she is wary of too-attractive Tasha: “to Allie, her face was like a cat's, who rubs against your legs while knowing there is a dead bird behind the sofa”.

A similar envy and suspicion undermine the relationship between the successful, lonely author, Andrea, and ambitious Lily, whom Andrea takes on as a protégée-cum-cleaner, after Lily's story fails to win a literary competition for which Andrea was a judge. Mackay has had to bear the burden of being a Whitbread and now a Booker judge, and so the comically weary tone she allows here is understandable, but it makes the conflict between the two women rather schematic. (Mackay gets considerable pleasure throughout the volume in penning imagined titles to bad literary productions, whether it's Andrea's remaindered Virago classic Mistletoe in a Dirty Glass or a gritty television play called Pigs and Spigots.) As in her last novel, The Artist's Widow (1998), Mackay occasionally chooses soft targets for her cultural satire. The smug couple in “Barbarians” run a Benetton-like children's clothing business, for whose catalogues they blithely encourage the children of their Asian workers to model. Here, Mackay's broad brush paints the loathsome father not just as a philanderer but also as an arch-capitalist who argues with his daughter about the minimum wage, and accuses his ailing son of looking “like some homeless layabout in a shop doorway begging for change”.

The book is scattered with examples of the lovely, precise prose for which Mackay is celebrated, as when two young boys wait in “the raw noon of a motherless, shapeless Saturday”. But there are moments when Mackay's eye fails her, producing a baffling description such as “the dark bobbles of the plane tree in the square where she lived were draggling like trimmings of frowsty curtains in a sky of mushroom soup”. Mackay shows subtle compassion when her imagination turns to troubled or less privileged characters, as is common in her earlier stories, but can also write with a detachment that keeps her tone quite cold. She shows an ease and confidence with this form. There may not be anything in this volume to match the smooth menace of Dreams of Dead Women's Handbags (1987), but there are elegance and delicacy, farce and tragedy, and colours and textures to awaken any alert reader's senses.