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James Kidd

Open Secrets 
Alice Munro 
(Vintage) 
In an age when the novel reigns supreme, few short-story writers are in the running for major literary prizes. One glorious exception is Canadian writer Alice Munro,  who beat Peter  Carey, James  Kelman and V.S.  Naipaul to scoop the International Man Booker Prize  on Wednesday.  Although her last publication, The View from Castle  Rock, is a form of fictionalised memoir, Munro's triumph is due to a series of short-story collections of consistent and, many would argue, unparalleled brilliance.
Compared regularly to Joyce and  Chekhov, and venerated by contemporary giants  such as Jonathan Franzen  and Margaret Atwood,  Munro has enjoyed an Indian summer critically thanks to late, great works  such as Runaway, No Love Lost and the selections, Carried Away  and Vintage Munro.  
All of these are wonderful, but I love 1994's Open Secrets, not least because it contains arguably Munro's finest (or at least my favourite) story, Carried Away.
The narrative begins in 1917 with a correspondence between Louisa, a librarian in Munro's regular setting of  Carstairs, Ontario, and Jack Agnew, a local mill worker sent to fight in  the first world war. Although the two have never met,  Jack falls in love on paper - or at least appears to. For when he returns home, he marries his fianc?e.
Louisa confides all this to a travelling salesman, Jim Frarey, who suggests that far from trying to deceive her, Jack simply got 'a little carried away' with the emotion of the war and the letters. Munro  continually toys with this phrase throughout the rest of the story. Louisa, for instance, sleeps with Jim and feels like the 'mattress ... were carrying her off'.
More grimly, Jack is decapitated at the  sawmill, his death revealing what he hid in life: that each evening he visited the library to watch Louisa at work, carrying away unchecked library books each and every time. Although he stood in full view, Louisa had no way to recognise her epistolary lover. 'I never saw him. I never saw him, to know who he was,' she says.
Jack's death inadvertently introduces Louisa to his boss, Arthur, who picks up his bloodied head from the mill floor. This weaving together of seemingly disparate lives is typical of Munro: indeed, her most audacious act in Carried Away is to arrange a touching but long overdue encounter between a now elderly Louisa and Jack  in a vision that crosses time and space to blend the history of the  Tolpuddle Martyrs, Thomas Hardy and English immigrants to Canada.
It only remains for me to add that the other stories in Open Secret are just as good. And secondly to advise you, in the words of  novelist fan Franzen, to  'read Munro. Read Munro'. 



BOOK (1994)