the map village street editors

If ever you look up from whatever electronic gadget is flickering its screen at you, pause, and think, are we getting more stupid as the world gets faster?, a small antidote to despair can be found in a book such as Alice Munro’s The View from Castle Rock.

I don’t mean that the book is like a piece of chocolate, momentarily comforting. It’s more like coming across a deep well of good water in an arid land. A book like this is proof positive that, despite predictions about the dire state of literature, our best writers write better than ever. However brilliant were the novels and stories of the past, no one in the 20^th century wrote like this. Munro, and her fellow Canadian, Margaret Atwood, have invented a new hybrid form of short story and the results, I think, will be something like what happened in the wake of Truman Capote ‘inventing’ reportage in his book about two murderers, In Cold Blood.

They have made it possible to write in this highly charged space between the personal and the universal, the real and the transcendent.

Munro’s latest is The View from Castle Rock, and it starts a little stiffly, with the Canadian writer telling us about how an interest in her family’s history led her to start experimenting with stories based on characters, starting with her great-great-great-grandfather. They were Scottish, part of the wave of immigrants who left to try their luck in Canada in the early 19th century.

With her skills as a short story specialist, Munro takes what facts she can find about these forebears and imagines them into stories: that’s pretty much standard for creative writing.

But the second half of the book is where it starts getting strange and lovely. The family’s story is brought up to date, with Munro herself becoming the main character. ‘I put myself in the center and wrote about that self, as searchingly as I could,’ she explains. ‘But the figures around this self took on their own life and color and did things they had not done in reality.’

Isn’t this what those caught out lying about their life story have been doing, the reason James Frey (A Million Little Pieces) got into so much trouble. That’s where it gets interesting. ‘You could say that such stories pay more attention to the truth of life than fiction does. But not enough to swear on,’ is how Munro explains it.

But somehow, it’s as though this ’searching’ she does in part-fictionalizing her own life is more true than any auto-biography can be. Munro makes it sound like she is led towards this alternative reality almost against her will.

It’s that age-old idea that art transcends the individual who creates it, and that’s how Munro’s writing sounds. Fabulous technique, lovely intelligent execution, but something else, too, the magic that is why we love literature.