Interesting collection of short stories. Two main themes recur - the flexible nature of time and the need to be a fully alive human being, not a mindless ant in a grey termite mound of mere existence. Reminded me a bit of the stories of H G Wells. Well worth the read. ( )

Over the past few years I've enjoyed the three Priestley novels I've read (The Thirty-First of June, The Shapes of Sleep, Saturn Over the Water), all of them, coincidentally, first published around 1951. That is to say, it was a coincidence that everything of Priestley's I've read has come from such a narrow period of his long career, and thus are probably not very representative of his work as a whole. This collection of short fantasy stories was published in 1953, and the stories appear to have been written over the preceding few years -- all except 'Mr Strenberry's Tale', which an author's note says was published years before the others.

Priestley, in the early 1950s at least, was very concerned with what was going on in the world, and the quality of his work is proportional to how well he is able to transmute his urgent, ever-present didactic purpose into art and entertainment. The novel 'The Shapes of Sleep' sums up his concerns pretty well, I think, with its idea that humanity is threatened by malevolent forces that seek to 'ant' us; that mass media and new technology tend to promote conformity and obedience to authority; that in short we are becoming more like ants.

Many of the stories in this collection express this concern, and a number of them do it very artlessly indeed. Several are close variations on 'An awful man who is part of what's wrong with the world has a mystical experience which causes him to adopt Priestley's opinions'. 'The Leadington Incident' is one of these, and it's so like 'Guest of Honour' it could almost be a rewrite, an attempt to take an unsuccessfully executed idea and get it right this time. He didn't, to my mind -- his didactic purpose is far too evident, and the stories serve only to express his opinions at length, not to dramatise them.

The best story in the collection is barely touched by this didactic purpose: 'The Other Place', a variation on Wells's 'The Door in the Wall'. In it, a dissatisfied man finds his way to a parallel world much like ours, but good, and then loses it. 'The Statues' has an excellent premise: only the protagonist can see vast beautiful statues that tower over the streets of London; the statues appear to be artefacts of a nobler civilisation than our own, or expressions of a nobility within the protagonist that is not reflected in his real surroundings. ( )