Two new tales from John Fraser.

These two tales consider basic questions. Life is a test, they say, but life comes to us as unanswered and even unanswerable questions - come to each, but surely we can't respond to all those questions, not with any confidence or authority? It all shimmers, seems uncertain, without a purpose, and yet - the heroine in The Test sees her partner swept away by gunfire, gone for good or ill, unloved and probably unmourned. She sees the solidity of all around her questioned, religions which might seem to give an answer instead propose a self-denial, abnegation ... many adventures, which should prepare her to sit a test, an examination - but instead ... the Test, it seems, is an end in itself. There is no winning if you come first, or if you pass, no loss - though we don't know - if you should fail. And yet - the protagonist, right at the end, feels she has in some way 'passed'.

The Scarf confronts a familiar scene. An act of sex, not much enjoyed nor based on emotion or awareness that the intercourse is the basis, the signature, insurance - of the existence of the species and its self-consciousness, its history, deployment, merits and demerits. What does 'casual' sex imply? Where does it belong in relationships, in self-creation, self-perpetuation, and a larger scheme, we must suppose - of everything as humans that we know? The image here is of the scarf - lifted in the breeze when the dance is done, the dancer finished, off the stage. It holds the shape of what has been, and yet ... it's just a twist of cloth. What is the moral of the act, the meaning, the responsibility, when what is casual remains with us, persists?

John Fraser lives near Rome. Previously, he worked in England and Canada. Of Fraser's fiction the Whitbread Award winning poet John Fuller has written: 'One of the most extraordinary publishing events of the past few years has been the rapid, indeed insistent, appearance of the novels of John Fraser. There are few parallels in literary history to this almost simultaneous and largely belated appearance of a mature œuvre, sprung like Athena from Zeus's forehead; and the novels in themselves are extraordinary. I can think of nothing much like them in fiction. Fraser maintains a masterfully ironic distance from the extreme conditions in which his characters find themselves. There are strikingly beautiful descriptions, veiled allusions to rooted traditions, unlikely events half-glimpsed, abrupted narratives, surreal but somehow apposite social customs.'