Things being various: and other stories

Eric sensed that he’d gone too far. ‘Come on now, Amanda, I didn’t mean that.’‘Oh, you did. But if you think an overweight, sweaty, middle-aged, under-achieving, pompous, selfish, boring, self-obsessed, sexually-inept, twattish, bloviating, third-rate estate agent—who wears the tie of a regiment he never belonged to and whose office is really tiny, by the way—is anybody’s idea of a lucky catch, then all I can say is, “You have to be kidding.”’In this successor to the seminal but sadly neglected Swimsuit Fandango, John Melmoth continues to explore the complexity of human experience. These stories range in time from Classical Greece to the contemporary UK, via tenth-century China, early thirteenth-century France and the ‘swinging’ Sixties.A number of the stories are about acts of kindness and acts of cruelty, the motives for which are unclear, even to the perpetrator. Others are about the randomness of things in general, the incredible, entropic, glorious, incorrigible WTF-ness of life. They are tragic, comic, whimsical and brutal.Three of these stories, which have significant overlaps, are about three amazing women and the generally useless—and sometimes vile and abusive—men in their lives. Useless men who should have felt themselves immensely privileged even to be allowed into the orbit of such women.Others introduce us to the man obsessed by Chinese literature, a child warrior, a furious musophobe, a woman who is besotted by swifts, and several ghosts.Together they confirm—if there was ever any doubt about it—that our lives are often very strange and that things are very various.