THE DREAMS OF BETHANY MELLMOTH

Viking, 256pp, £14.99, Oldie price £12.16 inc p&p

William Boyd’s latest collection of short stories, interlinked round the central novella of the title, slipped down easily with most reviewers. Perhaps a little too easily – Elizabeth Lowry in the Guardian wondered if, although ‘unfailingly amusing and clever’, they ‘sometimes strive for effects of pathos that the urbane narrative angle can’t quite support’. In the Financial Times, Alex Preston noted how well Boyd writes about the wealthy: ‘Many of the characters that inhabit the nine stories are rich males with low morals: swindlers, philanderers, thieves. We meet art dealers, novelists, bankers and, above all, people from the film industry – shady screenwriters, immoral producers, shallow actors.’

The character of Bethany Mellmoth herself is, as Stuart Kelly in the Scotsman pointed out, a ‘VARP’ (vaguely art related person) who ‘vaguely zig-zags through art-forms, lovers and Christmas tantrums’. Kelly praised the story’s ‘quite lovely ennui’, likening Boyd to Maupassant and Somerset Maugham. And Laura Freeman in the Times was also captivated: ‘Reading these stories is like walking barefoot across a bedroom carpet – pad, pad, pad, pad – only to find it’s been studded with drawing pins.’

But in the Telegraph, James Walton begged to differ, wondering if the short-story form offered rather too much temptation to ‘dish up half-formed ideas (rather than, say, form them) and to clear out stuff that’s been lying around for a while.’ While in the Evening Standard, Katie Law found it ‘a slight collection, in spite of such finely honed prose and a catalogue of names that trip so pleasurably off the tongue’.