The stories demonstrate an extraordinary range of sensibility and technique. There are extremely subtle psychological stories of enormous power and originality. Two of these, both told in the first person by a woman, ‘Jester’ and ‘Night in Chaos’, would be my personal choice of the two most compelling stories in a collection which is very even in excellence.

‘Jester’ is a woman’s strange account of her boyfriend, the Jester, whom she almost despises, to whom she is terrified of becoming permanently attached, whom she sees through as a sham and a bore, but whom she nevertheless needs, rather as one might need a shabby old sofa, to give some illusion of reality, some point of reference in her drifting, unreal existence. In a way, I find it a hateful tale, but it is certainly haunting in the way that Kafka is haunting, but with a quite original style and atmosphere.

‘Night in Chaos’ is as frenetic and pain-wracked as ‘Jester’ is depressed. It is about a woman reliving a night of shame, pain, and guilt. ‘There is,’ the authorial voice comments, ‘an intensity in the kind of disturbance caused by our most frightening memories, which makes us move along the paths of thought to them almost with desire.’ This state of mind is brilliantly and tortuously recreated.

Satirical fable, too, comes naturally and easily to Murphy’s pen. Damned Malbin in which a whole community becomes hypnotised, drugged, and finally poisoned by looking into the ‘Snow-soft screen of the Miller’s eye’ is worked through with the thoroughness of a metaphysical poet exploring a conceit in all its ramifications. The other story in a similar manner, ‘The Gift’, is the only one, a page and a half, in the whole book, which seems to me to fall below the quality of the rest because it is a cautionary fable which doesn’t seem to relate to the crucial dangers of the twentieth century, though one gets the impression it was meant to. I say this with some trepidation, for Murphy may well be doing some sort of a double take while he seems to nod.

Apparently semi-autobiographical material in stories like ‘Child Near Twilight’, ‘A House Like God’, and ‘The Garden’, is perfectly distanced with never a breath of self-indulgence or self-consciousness, qualities which in immature writers can make this sort of story an embarrassment to read. These ‘autobiographical’ tales are suffused with the same strange, fey light as ‘Jester’ and ‘Night in Chaos’ and suggest that the appearances of things are never quite what they seem.

The title story, ‘Black Light’, is the longest and attempts to render a number of visions, in one of which the dead, the living, and the unborn, his family, ancestors, and descendants, all appear to him together. This is a powerful piece of writing and does make the visions, insubstantial as they are, at least solid as the insubstantial reality of most of their framework. At the end he talks about Victor Hugo’s visions and the story ends ‘his last words were, “I see a black light” – I hope he found it illuminating.’ That’s a fair sample of Murphy’s ironical humour which abounds throughout the book. All the stories are both intelligent and strange but their most striking aspect is the sheer elegance of their prose. It is a poet’s prose, full of compelling and often breathtakingly beautiful images but even when the subject matter is tortured or violent the writing is always absolutely lucid and unforced. I will end with a few sentences from one of the most beautiful stories ‘Moon Landscape’, to illustrate its glamour.

The walls of the guard-room were olive. Weird bright things were etched against the light – wire, chrome fittings, tools; absurdly, they resembled the wings and limbs of a giant metal insect. There were three soldiers sitting on the steps. In this light, their clothes were the colour of black olives. One of them was monstrously tall. His face was white as a flower. He was singing, and every so often burst out into a shout or howl. When he did this, the inside of his mouth was like a rag dipped in blood.