The theme is familiar in Wilding’s work, the problematics of authenticity and interpretation, of ‘reading the signs’. Since 1972, Michael Wilding has published thirteen books, including The Short Story Embassy, The West Midland Underground, Political Fictions, The Man of Slow Feeling, The Paraguayan Experiment, and, significantly, Reading The Signs. In Under Saturn, Wilding explores the problematics of reading the world through rival versions of things, alternating between trust and distrust.

The sequence of the quartet is important. The first and third stories are tense and disturbing, the darkness relieved by the energy and wit of the writing, the second and the last lighter, more bemused, with a droll undertone. Through this chiaroscuro sequence, Wilding explores the notion that the very workings of consciousness become a prison to brick us up inside our own reading of the world.

The title story which opens the quartet is a steady building of paranoid imaginings. Beginning mildly with Collier’s depression, his sense that there is nothing to affirm, in his writing or in his life, it builds first to his bleak delight in grim facts, macabre realities such as the Jonestown suicides, and his fascination with conspiracies, the Kennedy assassination which he sees as a mirror of infinite permutations. With black relish, he enlarges his own gloom by pondering on clandestine conspiracies, until this begins to tum inward and induces his fear of being under surveillance.

While Wilding exploits the irony that Collier is politically inert and an improbable target, Collier reinterprets events, elaborating his tears of agents, phone-tapping, surveillance. Then, in a superb movement, a powerful subversion, Wilding suddenly reopens all the possibilities, as Collier shifts the location of his fears – to one person. It is at once a salvation and an impasse.

Under Saturn seems to me a remarkable fiction, tense and relentless, working through our collective fears of large-scale clandestine purposes at work in the world, beyond our interpretation. It is as if Wilding begins with the vague gloom and mild distrust with which we quite properly regard the contemporary world and keeps pushing it, with an inexorable logic, to the point where Collier is incapacitated, imprisoned in his own fears.

The third story, ‘Way Out That Summer’, has a similar sense of the world as sinister, an intention at work, an imminent dangerous reality likely to break through the surface at any moment. Wilding portrays a distrust shared by Marcus and Lydia in a setting of deliberate irony, an idyllic Mediterranean village, improbable venue for spies and conspirators.

The movement here is cyclical: events present themselves amiably, suddenly submit to more sinister interpretation, only to relax again into innocence, before again opening up to disclose their darker intent. A constant movement, to and fro, it seems a trap of consciousness, without redress. It is as if this whole dark sequence is one moment in a perpetual dialogue in Marcus’s mind, an eloquent but dark debate on the authenticity of reality.

These two stories remind me of Nicholas Hasluck’s term, faszad: a sordid intrigue, a conspiracy without a cause, bearing all the hallmarks of a calculated plot but with no clearly defined purpose. The two lighter stories counterpoint that sense of random intrigue with characters intent on their own inscrutable plots.

In ‘Campus Novel’, set in a provincial English university, the first-person narrator, Michael, becomes entangled in the perverse intellectual plots of Professor Edmonds’s Seigneurial and Machiavellian, given to gnomic utterance, Edmonds’s existence is one of gestures, a performance as if he inhabits his own theatre. Michael finds he is unable to interpret Edmonds’ schemes, just as his colleagues seem unable to read the slogans students have painted on the walls, as if they are scrawlings and daubings without message.

Yet Michael recognises the fatal vortex behind Edmonds’ stance as ‘an integrity of despair’, the lordly disdain that derives from seeing the futility of things. In the end, Michael admires Edmonds’s victory over despair, his nobly absurd gesturing. Although Edmonds is a memorable character, ‘Campus Novel’ is looser than the other stories, with subsidiary themes of an inhospitable city and student protests as political gesture, which I think dissipate the energy of the running dialogue on meaning.

In the last and lightest story, ‘Writing A Life’, Wilding affects a very mannered prose to parody a character content with the surface, trusting the semblance of things. With no inkling that the world might be inauthentic, Edwin accepts the version of herself offered by the elderly Olivia, a retired academic intending to write a literary biography. Through his lover, Cressida, Edwin is forced to recognise rival versions of Olivia and discovers the possibility that he is not a co-author but a player in her plot. Wilding parodies the innocence which is not only Edwin’s but also literary. Through this he suggests a literary disengagement, as if contemporary fiction is denouncing the illusions of its ancestors.

While the title story seems to me the most powerful, the whole quartet is a work of energy and creative discord. In patterns of light and dark, the four stories play across ambiguities of interpretation, with a counterpoint of agencies, enigmas and plots. Under Saturn has a pervasive sense of subterfuge just below the deceptive surface of things, which, Wilding suggests, is a condition of consciousness in the late twentieth century.