Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

Subtitled 'Stories of Fire and Ice', A S Byatt's latest collection are works of sensuous indulgence. Occasionally her story-telling gifts are overwhelmed by the detail of her sensory observations, yet most readers will forgive this and allow themselves to be carried away by her mission to winkle out the truth of a subject through finding exactly the right words. In a similar way, the artist in 'A Lamia in the Cevennes' becomes obsessed with capturing the exact blue of his swimming pool. The challenge makes him happy, 'in one of the ways in which human beings are happy.'

In Crocodile Tears, Patricia has lost this ability to be happy. She notes her surroundings, the heat and history of Nimes, with sublime indifference. This opening story gets off to a flying start. Having argued with her husband as to whether a painting in a London art gallery is banal or not, Patricia rounds the stairs to see him lying dead at the bottom, surrounded by concerned couriers and paramedics. Hearing them pronounce him dead, she walks straight past, gets a train to Paris then south, eventually ending up at Nimes. A fellow guest in the hotel she has picked at random tries to bring her out of her grief: "You may sit there, glass-eyed while things slip past...crocodile fountains, the stones of this city. Or you may look with curiosity and live."

The same message is given in the final story: 'Christ in the House of Martha and Mary'. An artist paints fish and eggs in a kitchen where the cook bemoans her fate. The artist tells her, "the divide is not between the servants and the served, between the leisured and the workers, but between those who are interested in the world and its multiplicity of forms and forces, and those who merely subsist, worrying or yawning."

Byatt paints beautiful word pictures for the reader to admire. In 'Cold' she builds them out of snow and ice and intricate glass palaces. In Jael she takes us into a posh girl's school where a pupil colours in a biblical picture with a bright red crayon. From here she recreates every nuance of the atmosphere of the school: "whenever I remember that patch of fierce colour I remember, like an after-image, a kind of dreadful murky colour, a yellow-khaki-mustard-thick colour, that is the colour of the days of our boredom."

The lyricism of the collection is balanced by a sharp, sometimes surreal, wit, as when the Lamia (half woman half snake) appears in the artist's pool and tries to seduce him, finally making do with his friend. In 'Baglady' a well-to-do wife accompanying her husband on a business trip to the Far East finds herself lost and penniless in the nightmarish Good Fortune Shopping Mall. A policeman moves her on with a stick. Throughout the book, fairytale and mythical elements combine with insights into modern life. This is a collection to be savoured slowly.

I like her novels best, and so I again find that the longer stories are the most satisfying.

The book has six pieces, each quite distinct in style.

"Crocodile Tears" is probably the best, and explores similar themes to the "Djinn". It is full of familiar Byatt obsessions: Modern Art, the South of France, sudden death, crisp white sheets,a berserk Scandinavian. She says that life is the act of looking. It ends when one decides to stop looking. The subject's bathroom design business is called "Anadyomene" - this is always good for a chuckle among her afficionados. But it's more than just an in-joke. With one unexplained word (it's a by-name of Aphrodite), she encourages you to conjecture that Botticelli's "Birth of Venus" is the image used by this business in its advertising, and then to ponder the ambiguous iconography of that painting and its connection with the themes of this short story. This is typical Byatt, making you draw on all the resources of your cultural heritage.

"The Lamia in the Cevennes" continues the themes of Art and Mediterranean Light, and re-introduces the delicious and fearsome Melusina. It is about some of the ways in which human beings can be happy.

"Cold" is one of her "fairy stories" that would be tiresome if it were just that. But it includes more familiar themes and obsessions: glass, the blond ice-maiden ironically called Fiammarosa,the arrogant destructiveness of male passion. Even ice maidens have to find a way to be happy. I'm not sure this is it.

"Baglady" is a very short tale telling us how close we live to the edge. A tourist loses her identity in an Asian shopping mall. Her dead-pan account of this horror is uncannily realistic.

In "Jael", she elaborates on the feeling of disgust for Judeo-Christian religion that I share with her. But again, whether atheist or no, the language we use is as much the King James Bible as it is Chaucer or Shakespeare or Donne or Austen or Byatt, and so we serve up butter in a lordly dish.

"Christ in the House of Martha and Mary" draws together several of the previous themes. Art, food, the power of anger. Velasquez is the artist here. Sometimes her references give a flash of recognition - a line from a love-poem by John Donne - a horse-painting by Stubbs. But sometimes the references are unfamiliar, and you just have to track them down. After reading "Possession", I had to read Vico and Browning. "The Virgin in the Garden" made me look at Ovid for the first time. Velasquez has always seemed too baroque and popish for my cold northern sensibilities, but now I've got to look at some Velasquez. Because she likes the things I like, there's no better recommendation than ASB.

There's so much out there still to learn, and time's getting on.