Last summer, I introduced an event in which a group of writers read pieces they had written for a collection with an unusually specific theme: a single road. It was, admittedly, a spot likely to inspire a few good tales Exhibition Road in South Kensington, London, with its vast, historic museums and galleries, its seats of learning and research, the unexpected 1930s apartment blocks and intriguing glimpses into side streets and the promise, at its head, of Hyde Park. Road Stories had been produced under the auspices of the London borough of Kensington and Chelsea, and its launch event carried with it an appropriate whiff of municipal grandeur: an upper room lined with leather-bound books; dignitaries; speeches; applause of just the right duration and intensity.
Amid all this were the writers, one of whom was Deborah Levy not yet, but soon to be, shortlisted for the Man Booker prize for her strange and subversive fable Swimming Home. She had not taken her inspiration from the Natural History or Science Museums, or the V&A, or Imperial College. She opted instead for the faded gentility of the Polish Club, established during the war to provide émigrés with a meeting place and latterly familiar to some as a rather laid-back watering hole. In the upper room, Levy read out "Black Vodka", a story of an adman with a hump on his back who takes one of his workmate's girlfriends to the club so that they might drink their way through flavoured spirits and, quite probably, sleep with one another.
"Black Vodka" provides this collection of 10 stories with its title piece, and with a fabulously jolting opening. Its first sentences, in which the copywriter narrator introduces himself, bombard us with cliches of revelation and metamorphosis. "There is something you should know about me," he confides, and "there is more to me than first meets the eye"; the woman an archaeologist will, he says, "help me become a very different sort of man". What he is, at the moment, is an outsider, one with "an incredible facility to wade through human shame with no shoes on", a man who has always thought of himself as lost property, "someone waiting to be claimed".
No wonder, then, he is launching Black Vodka vodka noir, a drink for those "in need of stylish angst". When he drops to the floor of the club dining room to retrieve a fork, he suddenly sees beneath the pink carpet to a forest, with wolves and wild mushrooms and bats, a glimpse into Polish history, and we wonder whether what he is doing is remaking himself into an archaeological site, ripe for excavation.
Throughout the book, we meet characters caught between openness and concealment, unsure of what either will bring, their identities problematically fluid and tantalisingly elusive. "What is your first language?" a man asks his new lover. "There are so many languages," is all she offers in reply. Another, happier couple get married and exchange their yeses in "all the European languages". Frequently, national and cultural identity is used as a prism through which to explore shifts of attachment and belonging, as in "Pillow Talk", in which a Czech man living in London is interviewed in Dublin by a Japanese man, before having casual sex with a woman from Cork and then flying home to his Jamaican-born girlfriend. Unsurprisingly, passports documents that are simultaneously intensely personal and irrefutably official are a recurring motif.
But sometimes what constitutes a person is even more difficult to establish. In "Cave Girl", with its echoes of Billy and Girl, Levy's terrific 1996 novel about an ambiguously bonded brother and sister, Cass's brother is shocked by her determination to undergo a sex change not from female to male, but from female to female. "I want to be a pretend woman," she says, and she succeeds; soon her brother is entranced by her blue eyes and "this woman's" new voice, which sounds "cool and easygoing like a best friend in a great mood". Cass is delighted. "The surgeon did well," she proclaims. "He really fiddled with my controls."
Elsewhere, Levy exuberantly mixes up the mechanistic imagery with the language of butchery. In "Simon Tegala's Heart in 12 Parts", human beings are "a biological highway of organs, venules and veins", but they also boast eyes like spark plugs and hearts that are biomachines, scanning the body for activity and information.
One of Black Vodka's most accomplished and uncanny stories takes the idea of human mutability a step further. "Stardust Nation" sees Tom Mines briefly referred to in the title story as the "Cruel Man" of the advertising agency taking a small-hours telephone call, in which a colleague weeps "broken words and images into my ear" and claims to be ringing from the moon. Despite his subsequent return to work "he wore a Paul Smith suit like the rest of us" his tortured confessions continue, centring on a childhood marked by violence. Except that they not his experiences, his history, but Tom's. Is this appropriation or projection? The clue comes, perhaps, with Tom's visit to the broken-down man in a clinic staffed by attractive doctors who carry hypodermics as if they were cocktail cigarettes: "it was a tremendous relief to see how distressed he was," he tells us.
Like their protagonists, these stories do not give up their secrets easily, although they are by no means difficult to understand. But they are powerful because they are fragmentary, elliptical; because they interrupt and disrupt themselves, and refuse to settle down into something immediately recognisable. One of the treats of last year's revivified Booker was not only the inclusion of Swimming Home but the subsequent recognition for much of Levy's earlier work. If you have not read her, go backwards to Billy and Girl and Beautiful Mutants and forwards, with these stories. The strange, unpredictable journey is worth it.
