[In the following review of The Facts behind the Helsinki Roccamatios, Summers compares an earlier version of the title story to a later, revised version which appears in the volume.]

Every few years a new writer comes along who is seen at once to be more than usually exciting, a new talent who may very well redraw our map of reality. It is surprising sometimes how little we need to read before we are able to decide this. Even a single story can do it.

That was the case with Yann Martel, whose second published story won the ＄10,000 Journey Prize two years ago. Reviewing the 1991 Journey Prize Anthology in these pages at that time I wrote:

“The Facts behind the Helsinki Roccamatios,” is a story of extreme youth and death, and I find it hard to describe just how moving it is. … When I finished reading it, I telephoned a friend, wanting company, but I found that I was incoherent; I simply couldn't tell her what had happened to me. … It is one of the strange things about art that what devastates us also in some way heals us, or at least leads us to where we need to go.

This has become the title story in Martel's new collection of four stories [The Facts behind the Helsinki Roccamatios and Other Stories], and I was looking forward to reading it again. I am not sure how long it took me to realize that something had changed. Martel's story was still good, but it was not the same story I had read before.

What had changed? At first I thought that Martel had made his story longer, and had lost some torque thereby. Finally, I dug out my copy of the Journey Prize Anthology and discovered that I was both mistaken and not mistaken. The story had been changed, but not in the way I had guessed.

The “facts” in both versions are the same. Two boys of college age, one of them dying of AIDS, invent a game to divert themselves from the grim reality of the illness. They decide to create a story—about a Finnish family of Italian origin, of all things—with each new episode to be based on an actual news event in a different year, which is somehow reflected in the life of one of the “Helsinki Roccamatios”.

As they travel through this century of shame and human degradation, the healthy boy looks for happy events to base his stories on. For the dying boy, the grim stories express his rage at what is happening to him,

The story is told in the voice of the healthy boy, and therein lies the problem. In the earlier version, the reader was always aware of how terribly young these boys are, and part of this awareness came from the narrator's choice of words.

In the new version, the writing has been “improved”. The boy's rash and inexact similes are excised. His verbal contractions are all but gone. I'd, more often than not, has become I would. Word selection is more careful, distinctions are more exactly made. The storyteller's voice has become more staid … and an important element of the story has been weakened.

Reading the two versions together is instructive to anyone who deals with words. We learn how easy it is, by effecting scarcely perceptible changes, to turn a brilliant story into one that is merely good.

The other major story in the collection bears the astonishing title of “The Time I Heard the Private Donald J. Rankin String Concerto with One Discordant Violin, by the American Composer John Morton”.

It describes an event in the life of a 25-year-old student who finds the Vietnam war “nearly folkloric, like the Second World War, the stuff of documentaries and hero movies”. In Washington, D.C., on a visit, he decides to attend a concert “for the socioanthropology of it”, and there hears the work of a composer whom he compares to Mozart, and whom he later discovers is an alcoholic janitor. Martel writes brilliantly about the effect of music on the listener, and his story effectively awakens reflections on the failure of success and the success of failure.

The other stories are not on the same plane as the first two. “Manners of Dying” is composed of perhaps nine different versions of a man's death by hanging, all told in letters written by the same prison official. The reader is being tested. Which facts are reliable here? (A few recur again and again, and the reader becomes very attached to this version of “the truth”.)

The fourth story, “The Mirror Machine”, has some good ingredients in it, but the telling is rather gimmicky.

Yann Martel is a greatly gifted writer. Read his book to encounter one of the most interesting young writers to appear in recent years. But if you want to see Martel at his best, dig up a copy of the Journey Prize Anthology of 1991.

I will be looking forward to his next book, and hoping that he will have learned by then to trust his instincts, and to get some sense of where, exactly, the point is at which editing should stop.