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Married Love and other stories

Married Love and other stories is a volume of short stories. The research opportunities included: 1 The possibility to experiment and take risks with subject matter and narrative technique, which need testing before they may (or may not) feed into the long commitment of a novel. 2 How to liberate the story from that intimate third person perspective which is often a default position in contemporary fiction? 3 To explore the possibility of writing in an older tradition; using the ‘omniscience’ that was unpopular for a while because it was associated with a misplaced confidence in our ‘knowing’ and our perspective. 4 Because that default position of ‘limited’ view has become so entrenched, how can the author move fluently between points of view - and to sometimes give an overview not available to any of the protagonists? 5 What is the ongoing value of the intricacy of the narrative compact with the reader, who will trust whatever narrative mode as long as it is early established, and doesn’t transgress inside its own terms? The consequences of the experiment were decisive. The story in Married Love where I am most consistently omniscient is ‘The Godchildren’, which works as a group portrait of three misfits connected together in their past. The omniscience is a distinct advantage here because these three only add up to something as a collective. Omniscience brought a huge increase in the range of the movement of thought; a surge of authority; a new compactness because what’s presented - what’s seen, or known - doesn’t have to be contrived as if ‘found’ incidentally. It has been carried on into the practice of a new novel.