In "Last Supper at Brown's", a slave and a wife are united against the "master" whose name is imposed on them both and whose treatment of them we can only guess at at a mere six pages, this charged, enigmatic fragment is an object lesson in the merits of brevity. Where the protagonists are intriguing rather than extraordinary, the stories take flight. It doesn't help that the collection begins with a weaker story, "Man and Boy" the material, about the elephant Jumbo and his loving keeper, who in 1882 left London Zoo for Barnum's circus amid a storm of protest, is fantastic, but crammed stagily in: "I was worried you'd have to tramp across the whole United States, but you'll tour in your own comfy railway carriage, fancy that!" The same is true of other pieces dazzled by their own historical detail: a bizarre counterfeiters' bodysnatching plot, a surprising discovery of transvestism. Perhaps historical fiction needs space to expand and breathe. Where Donoghue's historical novels kindle imaginative worlds from the embers of forgotten lives, these are like sparks that flare and go out: poignant, but sometimes perfunctory.
Written over a period of 15 years and covering four centuries, the stories are held together by their unity of theme, but their brevity can be frustrating. (The woman in question, Mary Toft in the 1720s, convinced most of England that she had given birth to 18 rabbits.) Each story in Astray is followed by details of the life on which it is based and the histories, legal records or letters where Donoghue found her seed of inspiration some, such as "The Gift", in which a reluctant mother gives up her child for adoption, or "Counting the Days", about an Irish emigrant couple waiting to be reunited, have phrases from real-life letters nestled inside them. It's what Donoghue called "hybrid faction" in her story collection The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits, where she used "both scholarly and imaginative methods to resurrect long-forgotten women, queers, troublemakers, freaks and other nobodies" from the margins of British history.
With Astray, a collection of short stories about emigrants, drifters, taboo-breakers and border-crossers on their way to, or scrabbling to survive in, the New World, we are back to the historical archive. Room, her 2010 Booker-shortlisted mega-seller, written in the voice of a five-year-old boy who has known only the inside of one room and the company of his mother, was inspired by the Austrian Fritzl case, but it brought an original charge to the horrific material: using it as a bold metaphor for the emotional claustrophobia and limiting routines of early motherhood. E mma Donoghue is a historian as well as a novelist, and her fiction often has its roots in the historical archive: the crimes of an 18th-century prostitute in Slammerkin, a scandalous 19th-century divorce in The Sealed Letter.
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