The Trick
by George Layton
George Layton doesn't write much but when he does it's near perfection. It must be half a lifetime since The Fib set a standard for short stories: quiet, affectionate humour, delicately balanced prose, unerring ear for dialogue, tangible sense of time and place and the heart of a particular society.
Each story has a perfect structure. The ordinary concerns of a twelve-year old boy are magnified through the narrator's eyes into matters of real dramatic tension. First, he gets nits in his hair and is sent away to the seaside, expecting and imploring his mother to rescue him when he's there because he knows he won't like it: he sees the Major who keeps the sweetshop disappear and doesn't know why - the inference is that he's a paedophile; he befriends an old man in a wheelchair and finds he was once a great wrestler; he finds a German Jewish refugee hiding in the old air-raid shelters where he has lived undetected for years.
Finally, in the superb title story, he tells of the amazing Manningham and his magical tricks - and the finest trick of all on the day of the school photograph with its dreadful aftermath. These stories aren't mere period snapshots: they deal with big themes and the taking on of experience. The empathy with a boy of that specific time and place is extraordinary - and timeless because, by extension, it takes in all children.
My judgment may be clouded by nostalgia for my own more or less parallel childhood. But I don't think so. This book is sheer delight. I think I'm glad Layton writes so little - we usually have to sift through tons of dirt top find the vein of gold so it may well be better to do it his way.
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