Notwithstanding
By Louis de Bernières
Harvill Secker £12.99, 288 pages
FT Bookshop price: £10.39

As Britain undergoes a collective attack of status anxiety – played out in the furore over Gordon Brown’s perceived snub by Barack Obama at the G20 in New York – Louis de Bernières offers a timely examination of the charming and, at times, heart-wrenchingly sad aspects of English village life.

The 20 stories in this collection take place in the fictional community of Notwithstanding, based on the Surrey village of the writer’s childhood. Named for its inability to withstand the ravages of modernity, it is populated by batty widows, diffident public school masters, ex-spies and the shadowy hedge and ditching man.

In an afterword that acts as both apologia and dedication, the author of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin debunks the idea of the English village as a historic idyll. The supposed golden age was, he says, “a period of ignorance, disease, servitude ... perinatal death and extreme penury”. Walking in the countryside around the village of his youth, de Bernières recalls being “infected yet baulked by the spirit of Wordsworth”. Delightfully, however, a trace of that infection is present in the stories’ overwhelming concern with what Wordsworth called “little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and love”.

In “Obadiah Oak, Mrs Griffiths”, for example, the widowed Mrs Griffiths gives a tin of mince pies, made in an uncharacteristic act of kindness for the carol singers who fail to call on her, to Obadiah, the village’s “last peasant”. Obadiah is conjured through the aromas he exudes: ‘‘leather and horse manure, costive dogs, turnips rain water, cabbage water, sausages, verdigris”. Like many of the book’s characters, he manages to be at once wonderful and mildly repellant.

Tales begin like notes for a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta: “Of all the retired officers in the parish, Colonel Pericles ‘Perry’ Barkwell was the most peremptory”. But de Bernières’ alchemy is to turn characters who seem destined for farce into nuanced beings. Take his rendering of Mrs Mac, “bent double by the thinning and warping of her bones”. The writer evokes the spectral figure of her husband, “reduced to semi-silence by the infernal din and carnage of Ypres”.

De Bernières shows deft control of the short story form. There is an echo of Chekhov in these ostensibly slight tales, which develop emotional resonance through acuity of detail. In “The Auspicious Meeting (1)”, a lonely music teacher called Brian stops to offer assistance to a fellow Morris Minor driver, only to discover a shared interest in music. Jenny has stopped to pluck a dead pheasant as she wants the feathers to clean her oboe. As her new acquaintance leaves, he asks, “if you come across any dead cats ... can you cut off the tails? The clarinet has quite a large bore and cats’ tails are ideal.” The shock of the request – albeit a joke – hints at an intensity below the polite surface of their encounter.

Other stories are more whimsical. The collection concludes with “The Death of Miss Agatha Feakes”, a character first met in an earlier story, “in her antique car ... with a piebald goat on the back seat”. She is surely afforded one of the most pleasant exits in literary history.

De Bernières echews Wordsworth’s view of man’s relationship with nature as redemptive. Instead, in his universe eccentricity is king. Nature is cruel and arbitrary. But the writer takes pleasure in inserting into this potentially bleak landscape characters that overcome it through imagination and a disregard for convention.

Notwithstanding is testament to the rude health of the author’s own imagination and the persistence of the short story at a time of the novel’s pre-eminence. It is also a celebration of aspects of Englishness that endure despite continuing threats to village life.

Adam O’Riordan’s first collection of poems, ‘In the Flesh’, will be published by Chatto & Windus next year