Reading Short Stories - For Queen and Country!

Sunday, August 1st, 2010

Ages ago, I bought “The Mammoth Book of Sword and Honour.” It took me a while to get round to reading it, as any book of short stories does. I always think I’ll dip in and out of the stories, but never do. Last week, I finally bit the bullet for Queen and Country, raised my bookmark high in the air and then planted it solidly in the first page. 

There’s always a satisfaction in reading short stories, often starting and finishing in the same session.The stories in Sword and Honour weren’t all to my liking. To my surprise, my least favourite tended to be the stories of campaigns in the latter quarter of the 19th Century, campaigns I’d often watched documentaries or films about. My favourite story was probably Joseph Conrad’s The Duel, about two Napoleonic officers who conduct a series of duels over two decades. Paul Finch’s Damned Ranker, about a common soldier who wants revenge on an officer, was also very good. A startlingly memorable one  was One Of The Missing by Ambrose Bierce, about a Confederate soldier trapped in a dark place.  

These kind of stories aren’t really my genre. I’ve never read Bernard Cornwell’s Sharp books, or any other books of that ilk. Some of the prose seemed stilted and slow-building by today’s standards - but the authors certainly dealt with weighty issues, by Jove!

I enjoyed reading short stories again. I can’t remember the last time I read a whole book of them (it was probably one of Stephen King’s collections). I found that in this anthology, the range of styles and variations in imagination were so enormous I couldn’t possibly like all the stories - but the ones I did will stay with me for some time. 

The last short story I wrote, incidentally, was a version of the Malaysian legend of Hang Tuah and Hang Jabat. And what a story that is!

Tags: Short Stories
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