Queenie- Alice Munro

It seems fitting that a short story should be afforded a short post (I am also writing this under time pressure on my lunch break) but I couldn't let this one go without writing a brief note on this fabulous story.

I bought a tiddly £1.99 copy of Queenie in Waterstones a few weeks ago, not long after it was announced that Alice Munro had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. I enjoy short stories but don't read enough of them- which is absurd because they should be the perfect companion to my daily commute (and could be just the thing I need to wean myself off of Candy Crush Saga, which has already consumed so much of my 27th year).

It's the first of Munro's stories I have read and, on finishing, I was overawed at her mastery of the form. Indeed, unlike Munro, I am struggling and about to fail to describe the story in a way that is not cliched or better summarised by somebody else. Sufficed to say therefore that the story, about a woman, Chrissy, who travels to Toronto to stay with her estranged step-sister, the eponymous Queenie and her husband, feels like the TARDIS, such is its extraordinary capacity for detail and literary economy.

Through the first person narrator Munro immediately draws the reader into a deep intimacy with herself and her characters but also skilfully builds and maintains a sense of isolation that permeates the story, and particularly her central characters. The story encapsulates the awkward reality of the re-consolidation of female intimacy while addressing the shift in dynamic between once close sisters whose roles have now been complicated and re-assigned to that of wife and housekeeper in the case of Queenie and unemployed sister-in-law in the case of Chrissy. Several roles are played by both characters throughout the story- and indeed Chrissy foreshadows this at the start of the story when she describes Queenie's appearance as being a costume when she meets her from the train. The necessity of artifice is a theme that returns later in the story and is something that Chrissy comes to recognise as a means of protection, of getting ahead in the city both personally and professionally. I'm interested to see whether this chameleon-like portrayal of female characters is a characteristic of Munro's stories in general and what such a portrayal might indicate.

Whole characters, such as the druggist and his officious wife who offers Chrissy a job, are sketched in one or two sentences but rather than feeling Impressionistic, the story is profoundly robust, clear and highly structured. Indeed it is Munro's matter-of-factness in her delivery of the story that makes the ephemeral thoughtfulness of the closing paragraphs, as Chrissy tries to find her sister again and again, all the more heartbreaking. I felt bereft for the characters and of the story as soon as I read the final line.

In fact, the story left such an impression that I instantly ordered Munro's 'Dear Life' collection. If any of these stories leave half such an impression as this one has had on me, expect many a half-baked blog post to come in the next few weeks!