I had to reread "Tristram and Isolde" in the light of a late revelation: at the second go, my hair stood on end. The construction of the pieces is superb. "You imagined it," insists the married partner of "The Flâneuse" "I invented her," claims the narrator of "Emma Bovary's Ghost": the stories hover wistfully on a borderline between the self-making of women and their appropriation into patriarchal stories. Roberts plays with memory and imagination. The sensual tale of girl-boy love, "Colette Looks Back", is a story of hair – young boy-girl Colette's wild meadow of hair is plaited and tamed, used as rope and reins, and finally cut. Potter, flâneuse, madame la patronne of the narrative world, Roberts drives story on sleights of metaphor. Feminist themes prevail: through invoking and subverting classic Victorian texts – Madame Bovary, George Sand's novels, Jane Eyre – the collection examines women's freedoms from provocative angles. Roberts brings art and artifice, the artefact of gender, the style of couture and cuisine up against the raw matter from which culture is forged. No: plain mud it is, deliquescent and unhygienic. Roberts could just as easily have used the word "earth", but earth implies a Romantic trope (Emily Brontë's "In the earth, the earth, thou shalt be laid", "Cold in the earth") "soil" would have done, but soil is ecological she might have rung the changes with "humus", "clay" or a dozen synonyms. It's a way of knowing," says the narrator of the title-story. Mud is the condition of eros the source of the edible world and its eaters. Down here mired in the clay of mortal flesh, readers are faced with the gunk and dreck of life, invited to notice what is underfoot, to enter and value the chthonic kingdom and taste its indelicacies. Human beings add to the mud bath after drinking sprees that render the world a giant vomitory horses in a Victorian street emit "a steaming heap of straw-woven horseshit". In "Flâneuse", Polly goes for a walk round London wearing jewelled leather flipflops: in no time, "Little curds of mud plug the gaps between her toes." In the title story, the words "mud" or "muddy" occur nearly 30 times. Her latest collection of short stories offers not only the poetry of Roberts's exquisite sensibilities but a saturnalian experience: the theatre of action is the dirt under our feet and fingernails, the unmediated matter of life and death. I n Michèle Roberts's fictional world, sensory experience presses voluptuously upon the reader's attention.
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