This is an eclectic batch of short stories, moving confidently from a greasy spoon to a dinner party, and from Bond Street to Budapest. </p>
The theme uniting these disparate tales is the frantic drive and push of desire and how, when it alights on the heart, reason and logic often flee.</p>
The author has taken Manet as an inspiration. It seems that they both seize upon one frozen moment and use that to illustrate wider themes. Just as Manet’s famous paintings portray seemingly ordinary life - enjoying lunch, sipping beer – so they reveal a thousand tiny details and provoke many interpretations. </p>
Likewise with Charles Boyle’s tales. In the title story, Robert becomes enchanted with the girl serving coffee. When he learns she is an artist he becomes madly keen to help her throw off drudgery in the steamy café and get back to her canvas. However, she soon moves far beyond the help he offered her and vanishes, though not in the way he had imagined. His helplessness in the face of her ambition and his own inability to act are all delivered to us via the small details, such as the bandage on her wrist she wears due to the RSI she has incurred from endless pouring, dicing and cleaning. This one image – a tatty, simple bandage – contains so much: the degradation of her artistic hopes, the healing and re-emergence of her ambition, and the constriction in which Robert soon finds himself. </p>
As with the ever-changing settings and subjects, Charles Boyle’s narrative style changes with lightning speed too. In one story he is philosophical and poetic, telling us ‘his heart wandered off, looking for other places to graze.’ Then he veers off to the simple and direct, ‘He just wanted to get her into bed.’ </p>
However, his chameleon style did leave me often unsatisfied. There is sometimes the feeling that each story spent too much time skimming the surface in a brave attempt to gather in as much detail and surface as possible. He wants to paint on a vast canvas. I would have preferred the author to try being a minituarist and calmly and slowly take us to the heart of the matter.  </p>
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<i>The Manet Girl</i> is published by Salt</p>
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