Cockfosters by Helen Simpson; book review

Mapping out the profound in the mundane

In her sixth story collection, Helen Simpson writes about the type of people you know, the type of people you meet in queues at the theatre or overhear talking on aeroplanes. They inhabit a middle-class, metropolitan milieu which, in less skilful hands, might be nauseating. Their stories could feel mediocre, rooted as they are in the kind of everyday matters – ageing, illness, marriage – that you perhaps read fiction to escape. But, like Jane Austen, Simpson is such an acute and ironic writer that you realise her characters are not types at all, nobody is, and that is affirming.

Each story is named after a place, although four originally appeared under different titles, and recurring themes are what truly unify this collection. For instance, is Vladimir Putin, who’s described as a “strong man” in “Moscow”, really any more ridiculous than the lawyer of “Cheapside” who thinks his wife shouldn’t work because her salary pales compared to his? The lawyer can’t bomb Syria but he can make life miserable for the women around him and, without millions of men like the lawyer turning the cogs of masculine small-mindedness, perhaps there would be no Putin. Of course, things are more complicated than that, as “Moscow” demonstrates: it’s narrated by a victim of domestic violence who says she’s “careful about employing women” because they nearly always leave to have babies.

The pitting of the micro against the macro gives this book political heft, as characters contemplate their personal lives and the big subjects of their time – inequality, the banking crisis, the welfare state. Simpson’s characters, like the narrator of “Kythera” and the women who discuss Charles Dickens in “Kentish Town”, feel overwhelmed by world events, in ways which many readers will identify with. The question used to be, can books change the world? Now we settle for wondering, can people change things? In articulating their sense of powerlessness, however, Simpson’s characters resist cynicism and resolve not to give up. “Don’t say nothing you do will never make any difference,” a mother advises her teenaged daughter.

Some titles – “Arizona” and “Torremolinos” – aren’t settings but semi-mythical landscapes in characters’ imaginations. Here, stories enter abstract realms, reminding us that short fiction often shares more in common with poetry than with the novel. In “Cockfosters”, two old friends ponder middle-age on their way to recover a pair of glasses at the end of the Piccadilly line; later, their decision to go “back into town” is their way of raging against the dying of the light. Simpson, though, eschews the overblown for the poetic restraint of Elizabeth Bishop whom one character quotes.

The lawyer in “Cheapside” is one-dimensionally foolish and, once the reader twigs on to the gender role reversal in “Erewhon”, the story is narratively dead. The longest story, “Berlin”, which concerns a couple’s trip to see a performance of Wagner’s “Ring Cycle”, initially feels disjointed. Eventually, it coheres as the protagonist’s “skull cinema, the thought-pictures which unroll in your head when you’re daydreaming,” is combined with the external world of her rocky marriage and German history. Sad, funny and true, by the end it had convinced me that, if Simpson were an American short story writer, she’d be hailed as a genius. But then she wouldn’t write so convincingly about so much life so close to home.