Some books (like this one) are meant to be read on a sunny patio in the south of France with croissant and café alongside; but some of us are stuck in Canada during the transition into Spring, so we’ll settle for beams of sunshine on indoor couches and “Tell Your Dog I Said Hi” mugs as we delve into this surprisingly delectable collection of Byatt’s short stories. She begins with a story that sets the tone in a particularly offbeat manner, where a woman’s husband dies unexpectedly in a gallery after an argument, and rather than staying and handling the fallout she chooses to run away from her life. This story is seemingly off-putting (the protagonist isn’t exactly likeable or relatable), and yet it winds through such compelling language that it becomes captivating. What are her motives for fleeing? We never really find out, even after she returns home, but the puzzle of her mind is thought-provoking and human in a strangely romantic way. Next we are treated to a softly French fable, where a painter becomes obsessed with the colours of the landscape around his home and falls into a bargain with a fantastical serpent. The story is told as completely every-day in tone, and yet Byatt manages to steep it in folklore in such a manner that believably bridges the gap between the fantastical realm and modernity. The painter’s obsession with his art seems beautifully Provençal, and we are immediately drawn into his almost-Faustian bargain with the serpent and wonder how their tale will play out to the very final pages. Even after the serpent abandons her bargain with him in lieu of more veritable targets, the themes around the never-ending artist’s “quest” continue on. Third is a more overt fairytale with “Cold,” a tale which sparkles with icy imagery while maintaining a fiery undertone that speaks to seeking one’s true path in life. Herein we see motifs around arranged marriages, the lore of royal dynasties, and the ends to which people will go for love, but unlike many traditional fairytales which pit fire and ice, this tale has a happy ending that is steeped in a realism about relationships and knowledge. This is clearly the crowning jewel of the collection, buried as it is in the central placing and bringing the tone of the set to a crescendo. We take an expected downward trajectory from here on in, even though the remaining three stories are still interesting. It is difficult to like “Baglady” as it contains far too much of the rational fear of the urban maze, or at least it does for me, since I have an unfortunate ability to get lost inside buildings with too many corridors. Byatt then turns to the Christian mythos for the final two tales, both of which trade on a certain amount of foreknowledge about the Bible stories for their success. As much as I know and recognize a selection of Biblical tales, these were two which I missed, so the major themes were largely lost on me. I can appreciate the unique structure of “Jael” and its play on memory/willful forgetfulness, as well as the carefully crafted characters parodying Martha and Mary and beautifully wrought scenery in the final tale, but without the background the impact felt a little flat. And yet, even as the collection faded into a quiet solitude by the final pages, it brought a satisfying sense of ease to the forefront. ( )

Elementals plays around with different aspects of "fire and ice", often also riffing off the idea of Peer Gynt's journey to Africa, especially in "Crocodile Tears" when a Norwegian on the run from a moral failure has a transformative experience in Nîmes, and in "Cold" when an ice-princess journeys to the desert with her fiery glass-blowing husband. "A Lamia in the Cévennes" brings in Keats in an unexpected way (and sent me back to read a poem I haven't looked at for many years) when a painter finds an unexpected sea-serpent in his swimming-pool. And there are some lovely miniatures, as well, especially the Velasquez story "Christ in the House of Jesus and Mary" and "Jael", where a very English film-director looks back on an incident in her early schooldays.

A.S. Byatt is one of those writers that has grown on me over the years. I first encountered her work, as most of her readers do, through her highly-decorated novel Possession, only to come away from it disappointed by a sense that an opportunity had been lost. The recurrent fault that I found in Byatt's work was that she has a tendency to overwrite, with too many superfluous details and ornaments (think of her pastiches of Victorian poetry in Possession, for example, which were masterly yet, for me, void of interest) that distracted from the story she was trying to tell. While I haven't yet returned to Possession to gauge whether my initial impression was correct or not, I have nonetheless continued to read Byatt's other works with an ever-deepening sense of appreciation. What I like most about her fiction is her sense of intellectual adventure. Byatt may be the most intelligent writer in British literature today. She is an author who demands from herself - and thus, in turn, from her readers - a rigorously honest and complex appraisal of whatever issue is at hand. While this determination sometimes leads to a tendency to overreach her skill as a storyteller, when it works, as it does in Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice, the results are outstanding.

As its subtitle suggests, Elementals takes the classic metaphorical opposition between hot (passion) and cold (rationality) and plays with it in new ways. There is, of course, an implicitly Blakean twist to how Byatt goes about doing this, in which hot and cold are never simple oppositions, but are instead made to depend upon each other in order to understand fully their meaning. This idea gets its fullest treatment in the allegorical story "Cold," a full-blown modern fairy-tale that confirms Byatt's long-acknowledged debt to Angela Carter. While Byatt, in treating the opposing symbols of hot and cold in these stories, nods several times toward the Romantics - the narrator of "Jael," for instance, remarks on her appreciation of Jane Eyre, a novel that gives particular weight to this metaphor - she also targets them repeatedly for critique. The Romantics, after all, privileged emotion and passion in their work, whereas Byatt urges the reader to consider the other side of the equation by pondering the pleasures and rewards of coldness and detachment.

Although this thread runs through the entire collection, Byatt makes her most articulate plea in "A Lamia in the Cévennes," the underlying message of which forms an implicit riposte to John Keats's poem "Lamia." At the center of the story is Bernard Lycett-Kean, a painter who moves from Britain to France in order to pursue his rigidly solitary investigations into the problems of color. There he is visited by a lamia, a mythological, snake-like creature who promises him that, should he kiss her, she will be transformed into the woman of his dreams and love him eternally. Bernard, wary of such a pact and wary of giving up his solitude, proposes to paint her instead. The story's message hinges on a key couple of lines from Keat's original poem: "Do not all charms fly/At the mere touch of cold philosophy?" This Romantic suggestion that we should not look too closely at things, that we ought willfully to blind ourselves for the sake of preserving an illusion, is vigorously opposed by Bernard. Instead, Byatt shows that, rather than leading to a simple opposition between science and art, Bernard's rationality possesses an artistic impulse with a beauty all its own.

Byatt thus makes a repeated argument in Elementals for qualities such as coldness, rationality, and solitude - qualities that, while obviously more difficult to embrace than their warm, emotional counterparts, nonetheless have their own rewards and advantages. Byatt is not, of course, opposed either to Romanticism or emotions as such, but champions this cause out of a sense of balance. Today's culture is unthinkingly sentimental, it seems, and so Byatt prescribes the qualities of coldness as an important corrective. Byatt's occasional tendency to overreach means that sometimes her work can be a bit hit and miss, but Elementals is impressive in its consistency. Byatt also helps matters by concluding the book with "Christ in the House of Jesus and Mary," one of her best stories, in which she imagines the story behind a Velasquez painting of the same name. Speaking to the distraught cook Dolores, who will later become the model for Martha in Velasquez's painting, the artist says: "You must learn now, that the important lesson... is that the divide is not between the servants and the served, between the leisured and the workers, but between those who are interested in the world and its multiplicity of forms, and those who merely subsist, worrying or yawning" (p.226). There are few statements with which I can agree more wholeheartedly. It encapsulates why it is that Byatt, whatever her occasional faults, is truly a great writer: for her, art and literature are not merely intellectual pastimes, they are intimately bound up in the living, breathing moments of living one's life. ( )

Enjoyable and well written but the stories, mostly, didn't really grab my attention. My favourite work in the collection is Cold - a nice fairy tale like story. ( )

Another fine collection of stories, as Byatt's always are. This collection is dominated by the two longer stories Crocodile Tears and Cold - the latter is a fairytale like those in The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye, and Byatt's fairytales match those of Angela Carter. As always there is plenty of erudition and wisdom thrown in along with a little arcane vocabulary. A pleasure to read. ( )