Alice Munro is a writer’s writer. Her prose is clear yet solid, like ice with no flaws. Her stories march firmly from beginning to end. And you march with them, reading in perfect time to the rhythms of her writing.

 

Dear Life is a collection of fourteen short stories published in 2012. By then Munro had received numerous awards for her work, including the Man Booker Prize for International fiction. In 2013 she was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature as ‘master of the contemporary short story.’ Dear Life was to be her last book. She was 81 years old. She died in 2024.

 

Munro is Canadian and the stories in Dear Life are nearly all set in rural Canada. And they are nearly all set in the past. They bring that past Canada to life: the vast spaces, the smallness of the towns, the remoteness of the farms, the brutality of the seasons, the rawness of the people intruding on the land. Yet there are very few passages of description, just the odd little bit here and there, where the story lets it in.

 

‘The trees , maples and oaks and others, were second growth, though of an impressive size, indicating there had been cleared land.’

 

‘Then there was silence, the air like ice.’

 

‘The dream was in fact a lot like the Vancouver weather – a dismal sort of longing, a rainy dreamy sadness, a weight that shifted round her heart.’

 

‘They walked on planks laid over an uneven dirt floor, in a darkness provided by the boarded-up window.”

 

The stories are nearly all narration: either a first person narrator recounting events in a past life or a third person that is at the same time both distant and immediate.

 

‘Over the hill came a box on wheels, being pulled by two quite small horses. Smaller than the one in the field but no end livelier. And in the box sat a half dozen or so little men. All dressed in black, with proper black hats on their heads.

The sound was coming from them. It was singing. Discreet high-pitched little voices as sweet as could be. They never looked at him as they went by.

That chilled him. The buggy in the barn and the horse in the field were nothing in comparison.

He was still standing there looking one way and another when he heard her call, “All finished.” She was standing by the house.’

 

Here the reader is in a scene, experiencing something strange, along with the character, but there is a dreamlike quality as if a story is being told by someone else, which indeed it is. Munro does it with her use of verbs. ‘Over the  hill came a box’ not ‘A box came over the hill’ and ‘being pulled’ by the horses, not ‘the horses pulling the box’. And there are few commas in that piece. No pauses or explanations or asides. The strange scene ploughs strangely and steadily on.

 

The character here is Jackson. He is in a story called Train. Travelling home at the close of the Second World War, he  jumps off the train before his hometown and walks back along the track. No explanation is offered for this action, except that he is avoiding something. Jackson is offered breakfast by a woman running a small farm by the train tracks. He stays, for thirteen years. The woman becomes ill. He drives her to hospital. After surgery she tells him of a disturbing instance in her past, and also that she will leave the farm to him. He never returns to the hospital.

 

That marching along with the pace of the story you do as a reader? It becomes disturbing. There is no introspection. Jackson never analyses his actions. He left a woman who was dying and who had just revealed the biggest and hardest event of her life to him. He apparently has no moral compass. And you, the reader, are likely to be swept along regardless, if you don’t reach out for something floating in your own mind and stop yourself drowning.

 

There is the same nexus of careless exploitation, this lack of concern for the effect of their actions, on the part of the characters in many of the stories. The couple who plan a joint suicide in a car in the forest: do they have no thought of pain of the people who will find them? The man who promises to marry a girl and runs off at the last moment, despite having lived with her as his mistress. The man who doesn’t run to save a child from drowning. The woman who goes to another town for a sexual assignation, taking her five-year-old with her.

 

Endings are often left wide open. They are often one short paragraph or even just a short sentence, apparently final but ambiguous as far as the character is concerned.

 

‘She just stood waiting for whatever had to come next.’

 

‘So that’s the way they were going to leave it. Too late to do another thing. When there could have been worse, much worse.’

 

‘In the morning he got off in Kapukasing. He could smell the mills, and was encouraged by the cooler air. Work there, sure to be work in a lumbering town.’

 

I confess I don’t know what to make of the lack of introspection and resolution these stories. Unfortunate circumstances? Past trauma? Bad decisions? Huge character failings? A disregard for others? No sense of any obligation beyond the self? There is no answer. These stories are written in simple, clear prose with straightforward plots, but they are far from simple and clear.

 

I know reading one at bedtime gave me nightmares, and these are not horror stories.

 

Is Dear Life for you? I wonder what you will make of it.