Fiction: Take a new writer who arrived from nowhere with a dramatic, ambitious and important first novel. Take that same writer and her debut book that went on to feature on the Booker shortlist.
Take that same writer, who was included, deservedly, on last year's Granta list of best young British novelists, duly represented in the edition devoted to the list by a quiet, understated short story, 'Field Study'. That story gives the title to Rachel Seiffert's subtle and impressive collection of 11 terse, if elegant, stories. This book is so good that even a positive review seems inadequate; the fairest thing to say would be "read it".
There are no tricks, no devices, indeed hardly even a surplus adjective. Seiffert acknowledges that the very act of using language requires a sense of responsibility. She is careful, deliberate, impressively honest, even honourable. Her prose is clean, direct, almost cryptic; dialogue is precise, rather abrupt. No one is particularly talkative. Gestures take over, life as lived.
A scrupulous intelligence is at work. Intense, though neither oppressive nor worthy, here is a book shaped by a response to real life. It is extraordinary to experience these fictions, each an insight into the ordinary lives of ordinary people. In an age when so many writers are performance artists playing with words, feelings and the act of narrative, along comes a storyteller who stands at a distance without becoming remote from feeling.
She is a European writer, her fiction goes beyond simple national boundaries, her themes are both major and personal. Throughout this book, variations on the theme of guilt are at work. There are personal failures, relationships that didn't work. A young man rents a flat and devotes his energy to creating a home for himself and his pregnant girlfriend - but she walks away. Elsewhere, a young wife and mother leaves her non-life in Poland to work in Germany and hopefully find the husband who simply left. At no time does Seiffert intrude; she takes no side, offers no explanation. Instead she observes, or rather records the ways in which things happen.
Mothers and children feature throughout. She looks at the evolution of parent/child relationships as babies become people, children become strangers. Nothing is obvious. In 'Reach', a defeated working mother arrives for a parents' evening:
"She's doing badly, then."
"Well, no, not exactly. She can read and write. Quite well for a seven-year-old, as it happens . . . She's just not an easy child to reach, Mrs Bell."
Without daring to invade the child's mind, Seiffert, as respecter of distances, deftly explains the way in which the little girl has come to see her mother:
In the door and then chopping, no sitting down between and no hello either. But this is not unusual. Kim's description of her mother in one of her schoolbooks: she always cooks with her coat on.
Seiffert is not writing about a lack of love; this is far more real. The mother is trying her best but has simply missed the clues. In another story, a family goes on an outing to a beach. Nothing dramatic happens - "Before them are the three stripes of sky, sea and sand. Powder blue, slate and then brown" - and yet the sheer simplicity of it all is momentous, as is the way she alludes to the different stages of childhood present within one family.
Throughout her debut novel, The Dark Room, her 2001 Booker contender, a powerful study of war guilt explored through three novellas, Seiffert, the English-born daughter of a German father and an Australian mother, looked at the ways in which legacy as burden is formed. Most importantly, she explored individual responses to this process. She made the point that it is often difficult to explain the guilt of others and how this rests on the shoulders of those who follow. Her fiction is engaged in acts of understanding.
In this new book, those themes persist, albeit in her characteristically understated style. In one story, an old man recalls how he acted during a crisis when he was a soldier. Elsewhere, a wife rejects her husband's attitude towards his father: "If he is so irrelevant, why do you get so worked up about him?" She takes the old man on a journey towards his past that ends on a street corner. There, she realises, "she feels excluded, but also in a way relieved. Not German".
It is fascinating that even when she is most openly examining these issues, Seiffert avoids polemic. A heavy worthiness did overpower 'Micha', the third and concluding sequence in The Dark Room. It did sound the one weakness in what was a fine book. This time she remains in complete, occasionally quite awesome, control. Although so early in her career, it is already possible to identify Seiffert's voice - and yet there is diversity.
Several of the stories demand detailed study. 'The Late Spring' tells the story of a old man, a beekeeper, living alone. The beauty of the narrative is both unsettling and profound. "Spring was late in coming: the bees needed feeding," it begins. Describing the old man's slow passage up the valley, Seiffert writes that "the beekeeper's legs were a year older again, and his heart, and he stopped often on the narrow path". It seems the story may become an account of his discovering a small child.
Instead, it is a gentle study of old age, and the relentless passage of time:
Bees were the rhythm of his year; blooms and birdsong marked the turn of the seasons. Fifty harvests he had seen, perhaps more, no matter; he lived in the certainty of another, his life an unfailing cycle of spring summer autumn winter spring. Until this year, when a child came instead of the expected mild winds.
Sometimes words are insufficient. Not even the achievement of The Dark Room, its maturity and courage, will quite prepare the reader for the subtle art at work throughout these stories. Perhaps their brilliance lies in Seiffert's unobtrusive voice? Perhaps it is the grace, the intelligence - or maybe Seiffert is simply one of those rarest of natural writers, possessed of a visionary instinct that both understands and respects language and story and the way each explains life. Whatever the explanation, please experience these fictions.
• Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
