Graham Greene professed to writing 500 words per day, apparently stopping as soon as he achieved his daily quota, even if he was in the middle of a sentence. Admirable, maybe, but not a patch on that literary juggernaut Anthony Trollope who, a century ago, wrote with his watch next to him to ensure he churned out 250 words per quarter hour – 2,500 words before breakfast.
In 2013, the Scottish-born novelist James Robertson applied some self-discipline of his own when he began what he called an "experiment": "Could I write a short story on each day of the year? The stories would all be exactly the same length: 365 words." Robertson completed his task and his stories popped up punctually, one a day, on his publisher's website. Now all 365 have been gathered in a single volume, 365: Stories [Amazon], and arranged in calendrical format, allowing us to read them in the order they were written.
Readers sceptical of Robertson's project have good cause to be. While no one should doubt his talent (his 2010 book, And the Land Lay Still, is arguably the best Scottish novel this century), predictable problems bubble up from his self-imposed limitations. Three hundred and sixty-five words can only depict and reveal so much. Put another way, not every story has meat. Indeed, not every story is a story, at least not when we accept the definition presented in the second one here from January 2. A man travelling by train is not a story; a man travelling by train and realising he has left his bag behind is a story. "Something has to change for it to be a story," we are told, but this is hard to pull off in such a cramped working space. At their worst, Robertson's "stories" are little more than sketches, pithy squibs, snatched impressions, shards of something that ought to be bigger and better.
However, if we rein in any expectations of change and dispel the belief that size matters, we can approach these stories differently. It is the sheer diversity on display that keeps us turning the pages and trawling the months. Robertson gives us myths and legends, dialogues and diatribes, mock obituaries and synopses, excerpts from Scottish history and snippets of folklore, some of which is delivered in broad Scots. We get meditations on life's milestones (a birthday, the end of an affair), thoughts on art and first-person reflections on family and friends, where it is tempting to think that Robertson has switched fiction for fact. There are also animal tales, including variations on Aesop's Fables and a witty exchange between a fox and a hound: "I've enjoyed our chat," the hound says at the end, "but next time I see you I'm afraid it'll be business as usual."
Robertson has one or two recurring characters that crop up every month. Jack is an idiot (or “eejit”) whose daft antics are routinely scorned by his long-suffering mother in Robertson’s craftily retooled fairy tales. When he sells his cow for a tin of baked beans she explodes: “Whit use is a tin of beans? We canna even plant them so they grow intae a beanstalk.”
Death stalks several tales, in one story complaining to the doctor of stress, lethargy and “an overwhelming sense of doom”, and in another telling a friend over a drink that he is glad to have “a job for life”.
News events inspire certain tales, such as Andy Murray’s Wimbledon victory and the death of fellow writer Iain Banks. The story about Margaret Thatcher, written one day after her death, and one on the Lockerbie bomber, mention no names and force the reader to extrapolate identities from Robertson’s sprinkled clues. The Scottish referendum was a year away but two stories from September feature characters that not only go to the polls, but also share their creator’s political colours.
The strongest stories here are the quirky ones. In Five a Day, panicking government officials decide to hush up the startling revelation that fruit and vegetables are slowly poisoning the population; while in Strike, a dentist drills a patient's tooth and finds oil. In Time and Language, the writer-narrator sums up these bold inventive leaps: "They're the stories I let out in the open, the ones I slip off the leash."
The cover of this book is remarkably similar to those of Robertson’s Penguin stablemate Lydia Davis. If a deliberate marketing ploy, this is a canny one: readers who lap up Davis’s madcap short stories will not be disappointed by Robertson’s equally strange flash fiction.
Fireworks, he says in a tale of the same name, are “so transient: a brief moment of glory, then gone”. His fleeting stories work the same quick magic. Enjoy them while they last.
Malcolm Forbes is a regular contributor to The Review.
