Bookraft

Listening to Alice Munro is like watching a master draughtperson sketching away in pencils and chalk - deftly stroking in delicate light lines of conversation and then carefully, meticulously delineating with crosshatches and fine descriptive strokes - until gradually, just like in a drawing, the setting and characters take ever more definite, clear but also changing form.

She is constantly building up a scene with denizens, animate and inanimate, that foreshadow what is happening next. Its is almost astonishing how such brusque descriptive stokes and seemingly inconsequential dialog and common day exchanges - can convey so much impact - and then suddenly jump shift into tears and scenes of anger or calamity straight out of day time drama like the Edge of Night. But by this point readers have been pulled into a story of soul driven action.

In exquisite storytelling fashion, Alice Munro appears fond in Runaway to allow animals with their proverbial ability to reflect human feeling and mood, to sketch in possible directions, suggest lines of denouement in the emerging story line. Take Flora the family goat whose frisky energy for Karla and Clark is interpreted as first blush romantic attachment to Clark, then a more detached following to Karla and now she has disappeared from the family stables. But these are not the stables of the rich; but rather the constantly on the margin trailer-house ranch that provides the sustaining backdrop for the character of scrimping, scheming, hardnosed Clark and the impetus of this story of a ghostwalker and her Sylvia.

Do not expect to be surprised by the outcome of Runaway - the buildup has been finely drawn and foreshadowed. Do be surprised at the tension, almost horror story fascination of what is going to happen - and then be surprised, and amazed. Its that good. And there are four more equally engrossing tales worthy for the skill of narration (want-to-be writers, do take notes) and the sheer entertainment.