The Red Door Read Free Page B

claustrophobia, the routine, the gossip, the emptiness, the conformity, the paranoia, and the paralysis.
    The Village
is a marvellous achievement, breathing slow-measured life into a community that is, behind the images of stasis and decay, alive with tensions, inner voices, and stark
truths. The stories have a great deal about individual and community-wide identity within the Highlands, often creating drama out of the smallest occurrence. ‘The Red Door’ is a fine
example of the way in which Crichton Smith can make a story of human insight and development out of an apparent triviality, in this case a mysteriously painted door. Murdo awakens one day to find
that his door is no longer green but has been ‘painted very lovingly’ red. It is now the only red door in the village. This simple act changes Murdo’s life, endows him with a new
sense of self and of self-belief. The door evinces in him ‘admiration’ and ‘a certain childlikeness’. It leads him away from easy conformity to a new and purposeful door.
This story is simple, beautiful, and profound and is one of the quiet gems to be discovered in the secluded treasures of
The Village
.
    Like
The Village, The Hermit and other stories
(1977) is a rather serious collection, free of Crichton Smith’s irreverent, disarming, and punchy humour; nonetheless it features
some of his best stories. ‘The Hermit’ itself is a long story based upon a novella that Iain wrote in Gaelic –
An t-Aonaran
(Glasgow University Press, 1976). The story is
essentially the same in English as in Gaelic, though certain details and linguistic nuances vary. In fact a number of Iain’s stories have bilingual versions, which are best appreciated by the
bilingual reader as being parallel versions of each other – neither identical nor fundamentally different.
    Murdo and other stories
(1981) was legitimately praised on its release, critics admiring its intensity and its defiance of easy categorisation. Norman Shrapnel, reviewing it in
The
Guardian
, applauded its ‘ . . . distinguished though elusive stories . . . He treads precarious frontiers – between prose and poetry, between poetry and dementia . . . ’
    The ‘Murdo’ stories are available in
Murdo: The Life and Works
(Birlinn, 2001) and are therefore not included in these volumes.
    Mr Trill in Hades
(1984) is one of Crichton Smith’s strongest and most unified collections. Although the stories all centre around educational institutions and teaching staff,
their diversity is great. These stories are compassionate and grim and funny and tragic: their combined effect is to create a rich and penetrating view of human life (and afterlife).
    Selected Stories
(1990) represented Iain’s own choice of his best material and is naturally an extremely strong – and typically varied – collection (as indeed was
Douglas Gifford’s selection,
Listen to the Voice
(Canongate Books, 1993)).
    Many of the previously uncollected stories published now in
The Red Door
and
The Black Halo
are as good as those stories which did make it into the collections, and I suspect
many of them were omitted from the published collections for thematic reasons or because of lack of available space. They examine familiar themes but do so with a freshness that awakens alternative
perspectives and ideas, often with the full power, intense imagery and sheer verbal energy that are characteristic of the short story collections in general. They allow the reader for the first
time comprehensively to appraise Crichton Smith’s achievements as short story writer, to piece together this quite central part of his varied literary jigsaw.
    It is impossible, given the limitations of space here, to give an exhaustive critique of the themes, techniques, ideas and potential interpretations of Crichton Smith’s
stories. Iain often explored and re-explored specific themes in his work that were not only important to him personally, but central to his literature, his