Charlie Hope of the earlier London Jungle Adventures of Charlie Hope returns in a slight piece, ‘Kicking On’, which describes a marathon binge. He is the subject of a quintessential Lurie comic sentence: ‘Look at him, hunched over a plate of sausages, cramming them in like he’s just jetted in from a famine.’ Lurie’s invariably male protagonists have a surprising freedom. They can always move to another country, choose another climate, try a different culture. In two stories here, ‘Kelso’s Lady’ and ‘Rewards’, they can go back easily to the waiting wives and the, vague ‘golden rewards beyond’ after the transient excitements of the affairs they believe they have somehow earned. They have earned nothing, and it is not clear how far Lurie’s irony is intended; but we do know that they have felt the insecurity at the heart of existence and been frightened by the sound of their own voices. Beyond the famine and the bright girls, the jet with its ambiguous freedom stands waiting.

One feels this underlying threnody about singleness in these stories most clearly at their muted and sometimes ironic conclusions; the seamless thread linking those preludes and aftermaths carries a conviction, it seems, that the one constant human factor is the baffling isolation of the individual consciousness. The pieces are shaped around a Jewish anxiety about the sins of the fathers but also their rights; and there is an awareness, too, of the sheer difficulty of finally knowing another person or even of sorting out the complex strands of feeling about a brother. In ‘Lessons’ the central figure, as an adult, seeks to find his own sexual identity in an Oedipal purging of the influence of a dominant father. He finally breaks the image of the father, with his ‘unruly genes’, by visiting his three brothers on three continents, piercing through the weaknesses of the father as they are perceived at last in the sons. What might give value and meaning of life is recognised briefly in tableau of family activity revealing a picnic in a park by the Seine.

The children sat quietly. The father was talking to them. They smiled. The mother produced two apples from a basket. It was a scene of calm domesticity, a private life being enacted in the public sun, and I saw myself as that father, happy and at ease, passing his son a horn of fresh bread, I was that father, and these were my children, and this was my wife.

What is denied the speaker here is denied typically to Lurie’s narrator adventurers. It is affirmed in the writing as something, at least, to stand against drift, to anchor life in value, even as the faintly incantatory prose evaporates sound from the picture, distancing the image and making it a vision. Another story, ‘Camille Pissaro, 1830–1903’, counterpoints the incoherent and dependent life of the painter with the gradually unfolding psychic history of two brothers, Moses and the younger Ben, as they visit a Pissaro exhibition, symbolically linked by the, cord of a shared commentary cassette. It’s a nicely crafted story (except for the confused chronology of the brothers’ travels), one that again dramatises the ambiguous nature of a relationship between brothers. The Tangier story ‘Swallows’ is a sequence piece, a series of episodes full of local colour and vivid characterisations. The narrator finds reflected in the lives of certain eccentrics and outsiders an image of his own loneliness. ‘Tell Me What You Want’ is a sensitive story. A son, an Australian, visits the place in Israel where his father was a pioneer, only to find there are no clear-cut answers to the question of what shape a life should have taken, and to recognise, too, the mental tyranny of what has actually happened. ‘Two Artists’, ‘Were They Pretty?’ and ‘A Partial Portrait of My father’ are funny, pithy stories which suspend compassionate insights gracefully in the anecdotes. The title piece, identified by Lurie as a memoir rather than a fiction, is set amidst the exhilarations and grubbiness of London in the sixties. It captures well the atmosphere of the time, the seemingly inexhaustible nervous energy and the existential raptures of living high on creativity and cultural juice. For the central character the good times come to an abrupt end with a comic illness, a boil on the bum, which by degrees turns into a matter of life and death seriousness. He finds himself in a Dickensian hospital in Hampstead, a Victorian monstrosity of uncaring nurses and harsh regimes, of casual cruelty, hunger and ugliness, a ‘black temple of stupidity.’ With the help of some deft symbolism in the form of a tiny quail in aspic from Fortnum and Mason, Lurie constructs a brilliant Manichaean narrative design of lightness and darkness, life and death, creativity and cruelty, the elements or co-existing and, in a sense, defining each other close beneath the flashing social surface. The story becomes a kind of metaphor for the one deeply structured meaning in much of Lurie’s work. This book as a whole is partly dedicated to Barret Reid ‘because he doesn’t like short stories’. I hope he likes this collection, which is one of Lurie’s best, for it is as much about what life is like when the stories stop as it is about beginnings and endings and who does what to whom.