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Your support makes all the difference.IN AN ERA when Scottishness is in almost synonymous with the four-letter frankness of James Kelman, the Glaswegian writer Ronald Frame inhabits the footnotes of critical praise. But then he is inclined to dwell on style minutiae himself: 'Dark court shoes, a black crocodile handbag, variously coloured suede or kid gloves which extended half-way along her forearms, sheeny stockings . . .'
Sex is more alive and embedded in Walking My Mistress In Deauville than in anything Frame has written. You find it serenely in a crossing of silken knees, in illicit dreams, or in a collision that smacks of collusion: 'The rich stranger will pick himself up, my mistress will dust down his . . . jacket sleeves and trouser thighs, and - as coy apologies but eloquent eye-contact are exchanged between them - we'll start all over again.'
Alas, that repetitiousness points up the flaws of this collection (a piquant novella and nine short stories). Frame's tales are set in familiar places: manicured settings, prim interiors, in states of mind that repeatedly hover between suspicion and deception. At times he casts desperately for new angles from which to survey his stock terrain; offering, at one moment of near-farce in the title tale, a pooch's-eye view of the fat cat liaisons of his mistress.
The novella 'Mask and Shadow' is the cream of this fictional brew. It traces the marriage of Charles Swale, a young jobbing writer, to Marina, demure but striking, refined in her tastes, among whose accessories is a past of mystery and confusion. Its apt epigraph, from Jean-Luc Godard's film Detective , namely 'seeing is deceiving', shoehorns us into a narrative built on the premise that happiness crumbles in proportion to its intensity. Conjugal bliss becomes the harbinger of Marina's selfwilled disappearance. Charles, the narrator, is incredulous, numbed, distraught. He throws his life into the search, tracking his wife across the years - both past and future - towards a denouement brimming with pathos.
Charles's last utterance seems unconsciously loaded with irony: 'In the inky forest of words I started to lose myself.' Contrastingly, in too many tales Frame seems bound by self-consciousness, in thrall to the tics of his trade (the endless references to posh cars, the eye for designer detail) and teetering close to self-parody, like a writer who is typing with gloves, tapping sublimely yet losing his touch.
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