Hello Harris We can read you loud and clear

Jigs and reels by joanne harris(doubleday, (pounds) 15) This is an unusually inviting collection of short stories - unusually inviting in a literal sense, because rarely does an author welcome the reader into his or her mind in quite the open, unobstructive manner that Joanne Harris has here. Forget puzzling over what you think the author means: Harris makes it abundantly clear in these stories, sometimes too clear, exactly what is going on in her head.

We know by the end of this collection what she disapproves of (and disapproval is a big theme for her): promiscuous clothes for young children; disregard for old people in care homes; macho drivers; the superficial world of glossy mags; the hysterical atmosphere generated in communities by the fear of paedophilia; very skinny blondes; numbers; loneliness; too much emphasis on the importance of appearance; and betrayal. We know all this because she tells us in a little foreword to each story, as if the story isn't enough to give us the message.

Harris used to be a teacher and hers is a pedagogical attitude to storytelling, which sometimes works well. Hello, Goodbye is perhaps a little obvious in places - Angela K works for Goodbye magazine, which turns the business of dying into just another fashion shoot for her glossy mag - but it stays in the mind and has just the right light touch before a bitter taste rises in the mouth with the twist in the tale.

The Spectator is more sad than chilling, but spot on: a former headmaster used to taking his regular walk past a school, where he likes to watch the children playing, is picked up by an observance patrol out protecting children from predators. Set in the future, the school is surrounded by barbed wire: "In the barbaric old days, children had been scalded by steam during poorly supervised cookery lessons, acid-burned in chemistry, had their bones broken in various sports, skinned their knees in asphalt playgrounds Nowadays, all children are safe."

Harris is fond of futuristic themes. Several of these stories take place in a dark future, where money and appearance are taking precedence over the importance of an inner life. The message contained in these stories is clear enough, as it is in the many fairytale-based ones she also includes. Perhaps the rather tutorial attitude in this collection comes from Harris's love of fairytales, which themselves were once used to educate. In Gastronomicon, for instance, the wife of an immigrant who has turned himself into a prissy, rather dull Englishman, flicks through the pages of her mother-in-law's ancient cookbook, and accidentally heats up a little black magic. In Class Of 81, a school reunion of witches gathers in Bella Pasta where old scores are settled, and in a modern retelling of The Mermaid, a handicapped girl whose deformed arms and legs render her graceless on the ground but beautiful in the water, sacrifices her one virtue for love of a man.

Eschewing obtuseness and ambiguity is not necessarily a bad thing, but one cannot help comparing Harris's fairytale versions to those of the late Angela Carter. But where Carter's fairytales were anarchic and surreal, Harris's are a little more pedestrian; less hard to figure out, but perhaps less memorable. More than 20 years ago, I read a short story by Somerset Maugham about a penniless writer spending his rent money on taking a rich, but potentially useful, woman out to lunch. I can't remember how it ended, but what always stuck in my mind was what she ate - asparagus, something I'd never tasted. It was the most expensive thing on the menu, and Maugham's description of the luscious decadence of the vegetable, set against the writer's parsimony, has stayed with me. Perhaps one of Harris's stories will do the same for her readers, but it is the message- bearing tone of this collection which may prove to be more memorable than the message itself.

Copyright 2004 SMG Sunday Newspapers Ltd.
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