I had read the story “The Crossing”, which is still available on the Faber website a few years before I read the rest of the collection, which may be part of the reason why I think of it as the story which best represents Chris Power’s Mothers (2018). Ann and Jim, who have known each other for just a few weeks, are on a four-day walking break on Exmoor. They are still finding things out about each other. When Jim mentions the start of the shooting season, Ann is surprised: she hadn’t known he shot. She asks if he would shoot an animal.

He looked away. “No,” he said.

He was lying. She knew he was lying. Several times, in the weeks since she met him, Ann had thought Jim was telling her what she wanted to hear. Even before she agreed to this weekend away the trait had been irritating her. Now she regretted having come. (p. 70)

This isn’t the only aspect of Jim’s behaviour that gets on her nerves, notwithstanding her physical attraction to him. Jim is cautious about crossing a river by a ford. They don’t know how deep it is and he doesn’t want to risk their gear getting wet. He’d rather take the long way around, which would mean going back the way they came.

Later, Ann suggests that Jim had been “scared”, causing him to retort that he had been “A bit cautious, maybe, that’s all” (p. 79). The following day he’s a bit less cautious.

Rereading the story, I noticed that it is slightly reminiscent of some of the ficton of Ian McEwan (who is, incidentally, an enthusiastic walker). The couple’s walk in Exmoor is a bit reminiscent of Clive Linley’s solo walk in the Lake District in Amsterdam and the story’s suddden ending, with Ann helplessly looking on, seemed to me to suggest a quieter and less malevolent but still lethal version of the ending of McEwan’s short, early novel The Comfort of Strangers.

Another story which features a man and a woman who are physically attracted to each other but who fail to achieve a meeting of minds is “Portals”. The narrator, Stephen, gets a message from a Monica, “a dancer from Spain” (p. 173), saying that she is going to Paris to stay with a friend and would like to see him there. They had met at a wedding in Barcelona, where the narrator, Monica and her boyfriend Victor had all hit it off. Now, Monica’s message said, she was no longer with Victor.

In Paris, Monica and Stephen are happy to see each other, though he takes a dislike to the boyfriend of Tanis, the friend that Monica is visiting. Stephen and Monica doze off, lying on their backs on the grass in a Paris square, holding hands. When they wake up, Stephen says they need to go, but Monica is in no hurry.

I turned and looked at her. Staring at me she shifted her body, rolling onto her back. It was an invitation, but I hesitated. This was exactly what I had come for, but now the tiny space between us felt unbridgeable. To be there again! I was in front of a door I’d been searching for, only now I couldn’t reach out and turn the handle. (p. 178)

From then on, Stephen’s behaviour gets worse and worse. He insists on going to a club, though Tanis’s boyfriend, Alex, hates clubs. Once there, he refuses to dance with Monica, on the grounds that he’d be embarrassed to dance with a professional dancer.

— You danced with me in Barcelona, she said. — And this “professional”, she wagged her fingers around the word, — is drunk. (p. 182)

To Guy, the Englishman who told them about the club, he denies that Monica is his girlfriend, which is strictly true but hardly the whole story. Finally, he thows a punch which flattens Michel, the Frenchman who has been showing an unmistakeable interest in Monica.

Michel went down so fast it was like I made him disappear. A space cleared around us. Monica — who I never saw or spoke to again — looked at me like she didn’t even know me. Which she didn’t, I realised. I laughed. It was so ridiculous and sad. (p.186)

So, this is in part a story about a woman coming to realize (like Ann in “The Crossing”) that the man she’s gone away (to be) with is not at all who she thought, but this time it’s told from the man’s point of view. While Ann was nonplussed to learn that Jim liked shooting, in this story it’s the man who has trouble accepting that Monica finds guns “totally sexy” (p. 177). Perhaps Stephen’s ambivalence towards Monica’s “invitation” and his behaviour afterwards, culminating in a violent act, results from a feeling on his part that he ought to be the one persuing her, that that would be the “masculine” way to act, and that she ought to be a bit more coy.

There’s another mismatched couple in “Run”. Gunilla, who is Swedish, and English David, are supposed to be spending a week with Gunilla’s mother and stepfather in a large, remote, rented farmhouse, but Gunilla has had a long and fierce argument with her mother, so the older couple have stayed at home. Gunilla, like her mother, is not hesitant about bluntly saying what is bothering her, but not easy for David to get to know.

When David asked for more she called him needy. He had never known anyone as independent as her. When she left a room it might be for five minutes, or three hours, or forever. (p. 155)

When he asks what the argument with her mother was about, she merely says “The same things we always fight about” (p. 158).

Gunilla is particularly annoyed by David’s obsession with the Second World War.

Being anywhere on the Continent made him think of the war. When he ate lunch in an old town square, or crossed a railway line or passed any industrial plant, he thought of Nazis. Tram systems made him think of Nazis. Bicycles made him think of Nazis. Alpine passes and quiet forests — especially quiet forests — made him think of Nazis. He could never shake his amazement that an ordinary crossroads had been a battlefield; that a park had once been stacked with bodies; that a town hall had served as headquarters for a battalion, or even a division. All these places that had been one thing had suddenly become another, and both were as real as the wheel in his hands. (p. 154)

It’s possible that Gunilla is angered by David’s preoccupation with the War because it makes her feel defensive: he could be taken as implying that the Swedes had been too cooperative with the Nazis:

”Well,” said David, unable to stop himself, “the Swedish government did allow Wehrmacht troops railway passage to and from Norway till mid ’43. How do you think your grandfather got the chance to fall in love with them?” (p. 164)

This is clearly not a relationship that is destined to endure.

One review that I read mentioned how wide a geographical range these stories cover. It’s true. There’s a Mexican wedding and visits to the Greek islands, Barcelona, Berlin, Paris and Nice, London and Somerset. An English stand-up comedian, working in the US, has run out of his own material and adopted wholesale the performance of a deceased star, becoming a kind of tribute act that he despises. One story, “Insbruck”, moves from Cadaqués, Spain, to Croatia, Le Havre, Connemara and London. Notwithstanding the globetrotting it’s striking how often Sweden and its inhabitants turn up.

The narrator of “The Colossus of Rhodes” is on holiday with his two young daughters (Sonja, 4, and Nora, 2) and his Swedish wife, Anna. The peripatetic main character of “Innsbruck” is herself Swedish, though based in London. Gunilla, in “Run”, and her mother are both Swedish. “Run” is set near Simrishamn, on the eastern coast of Sweden, in the south of the country. The events of “The Haväng Dolmen” take place not far from there.

The narrator of “The Haväng Dolmen” is an English academic who has read a paper at a conference in Lund, subtitled “On the Aetiology of Archaeological Belief”:

It was good work, and I was excited about the presentation, but the few people who turned up lacked the ability to grasp even the simplest of the points I was making. (p. 134)

After the conference he decides to drive around the countryside alone and visit the dolmen. “I needed some time away from people” (p. 134). It seems that there are plenty of people about: there is an apple festival in Kivik and the hotels are almost fully booked. But the narrator encounters very few of them and for the most part he is a solitary figure in the landscape, which seems to suit him.

He delays his approach to the dolmen, stopping to eat his sandwiches and an apple at the beach. When he gets to the dolmen, he crawls into the burial chamber, then turns onto his back with the capstone just above his face. He presses his palms against it. His feet are still outside the chamber: presumably he is taller than the people for whom the burial chamber was intended. Though there was enough room for him to crawl into the chamber, he has difficulty getting back out.

I scrambled between capstone and sand, digging my heels into the ground to help lever myself out, but I couldn’t move. I felt as though the life was being crushed out of me. I closed my eyes and tried to breathe, and felt a scatter of rain on my face. (p. 150)

The experience reminds him of something that had happened to him when he was 10 years old, on holiday in France. A slightly older boy named Guillaume tricked the narrator into wedging himself into a crevice at the back of a cave which Guillaume had told him is underwater at high tide:

I was helpless. For a long time I did nothing but cry. Eventually, desperate, I began wrenching my body forward and back against the rock. I felt my skin tearing, but still I wasn’t free. (p. 149)

The narrator hasn’t thought about Guillaume or the cave for years but is reminded of them by the similarly piercing blue eyes of a disturbingly eccentric youth he encountered in Simrishamn. He had forgotten the entire experience but he won’t forget it again.

When I fall asleep, I feel the rock encase me. There are moments in life when we grasp what it is to die. If we’re lucky we forget them, but my luck has run out. (p. 152)

“The Haväng Dolmen” shows that not all of the stories in this collection are about couples who don’t quite manage to get on. The narrator of that story manages to be nervous and on edge all by himself. The same is true of Eva, the character who features in “Innsbruck”. As I’ve already mentioned, she is Swedish, living in London. She travels from place to place with an old guidebook that had been her mother’s and which contains her mother’s annotations, most of them now out-of-date. (The book refers to the Dalmatian coast as being in Yugoslavia.) By the story’s end she has not yet been to Innsbruck, but has made up her mind, after some hesitation, to go there next.

Eva features in two other stories, the first and last in the book. (“Innsbruck” is as close as possible to the middle, being the fifth of ten stories.) The first, “Summer 1976” is narrated by Eva in the first person, and tells about the time “I lied about Nisse Hofmann” (p. 1). This happened shortly before her eleventh birthday. She blamed Nisse for a minor act of vandalism which she hadn’t seen him commit, though he did seem a plausible suspect. The later stories, however, suggest that this one is less about Nisse Hofmann, or Eva’s feelings of guilt at having lied about him, than about her relationship with her mother.

The final story, “Eva” is narrated by Eva’s estranged husband, Joe. It’s the longest story in the book, just over 60 pages. Eva meets Joe in London, two years after she went to Innsbruck. She tells him that she tried to kill herself there, by throwing herself off a footbridge into the river. Eva and Joe soon get married and have a daughter named Marie, whom Joe calls Pluff. Before long, Eva is showing signs of depression. Eventually, she goes away, saying she needs to be on her own.

She sent them gnomic, uninformative and for the most part infrequent postcards from places as far apart as Japan and Canada, Vietnam and Norway. After seven years, a postcard comes from Sussex, asking Joe to bring Marie to see her there. Marie, who is now eleven, starts to visit her mother regularly and Eva gets a dog, apparently as a guarantee that she’ll stay put this time. Joe sees it as his main responsibility to protect Marie from the consequences of Eva’s erratic behaviour.

Joe wouldn’t have admitted it at the time, but he was jealous. He had stayed and Eva had gone, so why did Marie want to be with her more than him? Now Eva is back, and wants to see Marie again, the old wounds are reopening. He is surprised at how keenly he feels them, and how relentlessly they drag him into the past. (p. 262)

Soon, however, Eva is gone again. She felt something about to happen to her, and needed to get away before it did. Joe is furious, ostensibly on Marie’s behalf, but she tells him:

“I like the postcards, OK? I like them. It does me good knowing she’s out there somewhere. She’s still my mum, even if she’s really, really shit at it. If it’s all I’m going to get I’ll take it.” (p. 269)

Joe doesn’t expect to hear from Eva again but, nine years later, he receives an email from a doctor in a Swedish hospital, where Eva is being treated for a schizoaffective disorder. By now, Marie is a medical student, and has recently found that she is pregnant. She insists to Joe that this was not a mistake. She will still qualify as a doctor, it will just take a bit longer.

Joe goes to Sweden to see Eva but lies to Marie about it, telling her that he’s going to a conference in Germany: “It was to protect her after all” (p. 270). A week after Joe returns to London, he learns that Eva has died. He hasn’t told Marie that he knew where her mother was, or that Eva wanted to see her.

This final story clarifies certain aspects of the two earlier ones. The first story, “Summer 1976” is something Eva wrote at the behest of a therapist in the hospital. I suggested above that this story is primarily about Eva’s relationship with her mother. Twice in the story, the 10-year-old Eva wakes up in the night to find her mother sitting at the end of her bed, with a lit cigarette between her fingers but not remembering to smoke it, looking straight ahead. Eva thinks her mother might want to say something to her. When Eva’s mother dies suddenly of cancer, the conversation remains forever uncommenced.

So when Eva travels through Europe with the outdated guide book, it seems obvious that she’s looking for some connection with, or message from, her mother. When she goes away again after her sojourn in Sussex, Eva sends the guide book to Marie. Joe says he never saw their daughter open the book but she takes it with her when she goes travelling with her fiancé, Matt, and sends Joe postcards “from at least two places he knew Eva had visited: Cadaqués and Innsbruck” (p. 272).

This seems the best excuse I’m ever likely to have to ask you to listen to Traffic’s “Every Mother’s Son” on YouTube.

Edition: Faber hardback, 2018.