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appealing features of Iain Crichton Smith’s stories are those occasional and cherished instants of intelligent, lyrical, unforgettable epiphany, usually at a story’s
conclusion. Such moments of epiphany, knitting agreeable, legitimate, and meaningful correspondences together, make for supremely pleasurable reading, no matter that the perceived message behind
the images might be shadowy or negative.
    ‘Moments’, for example, is an eloquent analysis of those instants of clarity triggered when seemingly unrelated events appear to reveal an unguessed-at synchronous relation in a
profoundly meaningful way. A quotation from the episode about the second ‘moment’ may well apply to the endings of some of Crichton Smith’s own stories: ‘And that is the
thing with “moments”. They illuminate but at the same time they don’t necessarily lead to what you call understanding. And in any case one man’s “moment” is
different from another man’s.’
    A number of the stories end on a note of admirably equivocal epiphany – ambiguity is a common feature. For example, nothing seems clear-cut in ‘The Exorcism’, a story that
hinges upon interpretations of Kierkegaard’s philosophy, on which Crichton Smith dwells frequently in his stories and poems. (He was attracted to him partly because Kierkegaard was a poet as
well as a philosopher). Ideas and opinions in this story form a spectrum of merging colours – hues and tones that themselves often change as they are being regarded. Devils and saints,
realists and fantasists, the possessed and the overpowering encircle each other . . . and the result of the exorcism is satisfactorily problematic:
    I looked at him for a long time knowing that the agony was over. It was a victory but an empty victory. And even in the midst of victory how could I be sure that this was
     not indeed a second Kierkegaard, how could I be sure that I had not destroyed a genius? How could I be sure that my own harmonious jealous biography had not been superimposed upon his life,
     as one writing upon another, in that wood where the birds sang with such sweetness defending their territory? I looked down at him white and exhausted. The exorcism was over. He would now
     follow his unexceptional destiny.
    Some of the stories (such as ‘The Angel of Mons’) employ experimental narratorial devices. Because Crichton Smith’s stories rarely offer neat conclusions, preferring instead to
scrutinise the world through highly subjective spectra, these devices often tend to be appropriate and satisfying.
    ‘The Ghost’ (from
Selected Stories
– not the same ghost that appears in
The Village
!) throws a shifting light on the ambivalence, the ambiguity, that can
underpin inherent inex-plicabilities of human existence – and the different ambiguities that can remain after an explanation has been offered, while the final story in
The Village
ends strongly but ambiguously: ‘After a while our ambitions, thank God, grow less.’ The implication is that the villagers are limited, kept in their place; and their place is, simply,
the village.
    Some of these stories also explore an inherent duality in the human mind reminiscent of
Jekyll and Hyde
– for example ‘Mac an t-Sronaich’, the title of which refers to
a Lewis bogey-man, a dreaded character based upon a real-life murderer who stalked the moors of Lewis at one time and stalked the imaginations of storytellers and children just as effectively
thereafter.
    ‘The Old Woman, the Baby and Terry’ harks back to the theme of ambiguous survival, with an undertow of selfishness running strongly throughout. Even the baby in the womb has an
implied sense of innate manipulation: ‘The baby moved blindly in her womb, instinctively, strategically.’
    Love is imperative: ‘ “I love you,” she said. “There’s nothing else for it.” ’ It is a source of their strength that many of Iain Crichton Smith’s
stories conclude with a unification of