Books: Adults versus children

The Happiest Days by Cressida Connelly Fourth Estate pounds 12.99 Several Deceptions by Jane Stevenson Cape pounds 14.99

These two debut collections could not be more different. Connolly's deceptively simple vignettes are "stories", while Stevenson's elaborate fictions are described as "novellas". But it is not just a question of genre. In content, manufacture and product, they are as varied as a modest fromage de chevre and a salty Oxford Blue.

The Happiest Days is the ironic title of Cressida Connolly's meticulous dissection of family relationships. Happiness may be a characteristic of childhood but, in these tales at least, it is leavened by other, more equivocal emotions. In one story, a young boy observes the gradual break- up of his parents' marriage and in the process loses his vocation: "I knew I'd always love God just like I loved my mother and father - but maybe God was like them: not actually unkind, but just not perfect." When Jen's younger sister dies from cancer, she is forced to protect her memories of her sister from their mother's emotional dishonesty. A pubescent girl overhears a father's rape of his daughter. In all these stories, knowledge of adult fallibility seeps almost imperceptibly into the child's consciousness, forcing a change of vision and mustering of individuality. Children may lack significant power but Connolly's kids are generous, brave and imaginative in dealing with adult mysteries and betrayals.

She is equally perceptive about parental feelings, and has a talent for the unexpected. In one story, a single mother recovers her self-esteem by a visit to a tattooist; in another, a faithful husband falls, suddenly and catastrophically, in love with a lady lion-tamer. "Greengages" records a baby-snatching from the points of view of the child, now a grown woman, and her widowed mother. Their separate musings on the event reveal the constraints, as well as the bonds, between them. In "Canada", Sarah becomes disillusioned with her family on a stressful trip to the zoo. Gazing at her husband, she "felt an indifference that seemed even more poisonous than hatred". Her children "looked like ordinary children. They could have been anybody's". But her fantasy of living alone, strong and self- sufficient, in a wooden cabin in the wilds of Canada, swiftly crumbles into a bleaker vision of loneliness. All these stories chart recognition of human isolation that dates back to the Garden of Eden.

The four separate narratives in Several Deceptions wittily explore the pitfalls of intellectual arrogance. An Anglo-Italian professor of semiotics, aptly named Strachey, plays an amusing game with his own biography, only to find that the joke backfires. A Machiavellian Dutch lawyer manipulates a vulnerable student into committing the perfect crime, with unexpected consequences. A young Irishwoman joins a Tibetan religious community in Simla, and discovers that there are other, less obvious but equally effective ways of reinventing identity. An embittered art historian engineers the theft of a valuable painting in a jape that goes horribly wrong. In these quasi-moral tales, the dangers of deception and, in particular, self-deception are unnervingly laid bare.

Stevenson's expose of the vanity and snobbery of academe has an insider's bite and venom. She excels at verbal ventriloquism, creating narrators whose identities are as carefully mapped as their reliability is called into question. Her fictions reveal an enviable acquaintance with locations as varied as the hill towns of the Marche and the fashionable cafes of Leiden, which Stevenson describes in prose that is elegant and urbane when not clogged by erudition. Her perspectives are surprising, stimulating, and sometimes downright sinister.

Reading these two collections, I was reminded of Elizabeth Bowen's comments on "the imperative of relevance" in writing fiction, from controlled and delicate handling of her material - relevance is never in doubt. The tone may occasionally falter - as with the delinquent boy-hero of "Paradise Drive" - but nothing is redundant. The success of Stevenson's ambitious play for verisimilitude is more questionable. Her piling on of detail and the many impressive but distracting digressions result in a loss of clarity, which Connolly avoids by impeccable pruning. The Happiest Days may be all too brief, but she makes every word count.

As to which of these books I would take on holiday, both offer entertainment, insight and a new take on the world: indispensable to those tedious hours in transit, or languorous ones under the beach umbrella.