[In the following favorable review, Broughton identifies the unifying theme of the stories in The Laughing Academy to be “the limits of responsibility and compassion.”]

Here are nine perfectly crafted stories from a master of her medium. Shena Mackay's most striking characters are an unlikely, unprepossessing bunch—dry old sticks and wallflowers, the weedy and the seedy—but she somehow confers on them vivid beauty and coherence. The most benighted old codger, the frumpiest drudge, acquire a curious but unmistakable dignity and stature. In “Cloud-Cuckoo-Land”, Roy Rowley's borrowed spectacles reveal, with sudden, harrowing clarity, the shoals of salmonella in the kitchen, the pills and bobbles on his wife's jumper, and, between the cuff of the tracksuit bottoms and his brogues, the nightmare of his own ankles:

Roy could not believe the knobs and nodules below the fringe of black-grey foliage, the wormcasts and bits of dead elastic. … “These aren't my feet,” he said. “Some old man has made off with Roy Rowley's feet while he wasn't looking and dumped these on me.”

More devastating still, the glasses expose to him his own pretensions as a do-gooder, as a “baggy-trousered philanthropist”. For a few hours, he sees the signs of ugliness and decay in the community he has been trying to salvage; sees himself as a symptom rather than a solution. “He stood, what else could he do, a well-intentioned bloke in an anorak; a drone.”

Taking the classic short-fiction formula of a few “red letter” minutes or hours in a single life, moments of heightened awareness and urgent deliberation, Mackay draws us swiftly inside her characters through their unique relationship to language. For Mackay, this relationship is not just about thoughts: it is joyful flesh, aching bone, erratic pulse, stubborn immune system. Mackay insists that the rhythms and contours of experience are defined as decisively by this relationship—by old jokes and corny lyrics, by the bad puns and daft sayings of childhood—as by the rigidities of conscious thought. Moreover, she brings to the musings and chunterings of her characters a comic range which extends from Fay Weldon to Leonard Rossiter. There is overblown Monica who plays the harmonica, and Violet Greene who likes her own name (“pre-Raphaelite purple and viridian … the hectic hues of Arthur Hughes”).

Even the most incidental, monosyllabic characters have their own idiom, as individual as a fingerprint. In “A Pair of Spoons”, Bonnie and Vivien are lesbian Lovejoys, savvy rural antique dealers conning the locals out of their Clarice Cliff crockery. The man from the CID catches the couple celebrating their latest heist with a glass of champagne and a smoochy dance. “Good evening, ladies”, he announces. “Filth.”

Unlike the soggy inverts of D. H. Lawrence's “The Fox”, of which Mackay's story is a sly revision, this pair manage to outwit both the male intruder and their own mutual jealousies and fears: “the Friendly Old-Established Firm, back in business”. Mackay is not always so upbeat. In “Shinty”, Margaret and Suzy attend a book-launch to confirm to themselves that Veronica Sharples, the primary-school sadist of their childhood memories, has flowered into a best-selling, politically correct … primary-school sadist. Their satisfaction dwindles, however, as the evening progresses and they piece together their own complicity in “Ronnie's” regime.

If there is a connecting thread in these stories, it is this probing of the limits of responsibility and compassion. It is a question for the 1990s: what would happen if, strained to breaking-point by the Welfare recession, our emotional infrastructure gave way? What would happen if our resources of caring, of minding, came to an end? If the voice at the end of the telephone counselling service for phoneline addicts (Roy Rowley's Helpline Helpline) told us to “try a bit of aversion therapy—piss off!”? Mackay's vignettes allow us a glimpse of all these possibilities. But even at their grimmest—and there is betrayal, disappointment and horror in The Laughing Academy—the stories gasp out an affirmation of life. When a character wonders “whether we should love one another if we were made of glass, with all the workings visible, like transparent factories”, the answer is a brisk, non-negotiable, “We should have to.”