Enter Sandman
Smoke and Mirrors is an assortment, mostly of prose, from the writer probably best known for the complex and troubling Sandman and Death comics. Neil Gaiman's short story output is somewhat sporadic, so this collection is a welcome alternative to flicking brazenly through all the anthologies in the fantasy/sci-fi section of the book shop. The usual Gaiman trademarks are here: unexplained outbursts of magic, small but desperate unhappinesses, and a nice sense of the vagaries of invention - the introduction runs self-consciously into a story which, he rather plaintively explains, isn't the one he meant to write at all. Happily, this book shows the breadth of range among things he did mean to write, along with observations on the genesis of each story.
"Chivalry" is a lovely piece of whimsy - Sir Galahad ousted by W.I. woman - much like Joan Aiken's The Apple of Trouble. Babies, in complete contrast, is a terse and disturbing variation on A Modest Proposal, and it is easy to believe Gaiman's note that this is the only thing he's written that scares himself. Even shorter is the drabble about how "Nicholas Was...", a good exhibition of Gaiman's ability to create considerable disquiet in very little space, and not one to show to children who believe in Santa Claus.
"The Goldfish Pool and Other Stories" provides an amusingly dour observation of Hollywood scriptwriters' sufferings and some sorrowful thoughts on forgotten legends; it's full of loneliness, as are many of these tales in some sense or another.
There are times when Gaiman seems to be better at plots and images than fully-fledged stories, perhaps reasonable given that much of his work has been graphic. "Snow, Glass Apples", for example, is a brilliantly dark reworking of the Snow White tale, which, however, suffers from some rather unfortunate "mythic" prose that strays nearer Marion Zimmer Bradley than Tolkien. "The Day We Went to the End of the World by Dawnie Morningside aged 11 1/2" is also distinctly uncomfortable.
The supposedly child-like writing seems to be trying to hard too display its simplicity: the point seems to be that the child has more difficulty accepting family tensions than (say) the sight of a unicorn, but since Gaiman's forte is precisely that of making the fantastic less remarkable - the oddity of the Holy Grail's appearance in a charity shop is less pointed than the rather grim niceness of the life of the old lady who buys it; the life-stealing troll that lives down the road from the little boy is less cruel than the emptiness of his adult life - he has no need to parcel it up in somewhat overdone bad spelling and grammar.
It is, however, most unfair to dwell on criticism. Gaiman's writing serves his fabulous imagination very well here. Fans will of course adore this collection, but he deserves a far wider readership than that of the fantasy pigeonhole. Smoke and Mirrors is very much worth seeking out, even if you do have to venture past all the shelves of Star Trek novelizations to get there.
12th Oct 2000