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A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth by Daniel Mason review – rich pleasures

Daniel Mason’s novels come slowly – his latest, The Winter Soldier, took 14 years to complete. This is his first collection of short fiction, and it is full of stories that provide the nutrition of a novel at a tenth of the length. In all the tales the setting is historical, so the perils have safely passed. Which is not to say that it is a relaxing read: Mason, a psychiatrist, is particularly strong at depicting the state of mind a character works himself into when struggling with fear, uncertainty or even impostor syndrome.

In “Death of the Pugilist, or the Famous Battle of Jacob Burke & Blindman McGraw”, the “thick-shouldered, steel-fisted, tight-lipped” street fighter Burke faces a legendary rival, whose height and girth mean “his head [is] set back like some faraway peak”. But Burke’s fear, then anger, is really focused on his agent, who has set him up to lose the fight that restive spectators have placed bets on. Elsewhere Alfred Russel Wallace, “bug collector, species man” and the overlooked co-creator of the theory of evolution, worries about why Charles Darwin hasn’t replied to his latest letter.

Wallace is “driven”, a characteristic shared by many of these protagonists: some real figures, such as Psammetichus, the Egyptian pharaoh who experimented with children to discover whether human speech is innate; some invented, including a balloonist who encounters a hole in the sky. Mason’s themes are heroic – war, exploration, discovery – and where the characters are not themselves great men, they hope greatness will rub off, such as tragic war re-enactor Uncle Teddy in “For the Union Dead”.

A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth is varied in form (letters, essays, reports), and only loses its poise when Mason turns a touch experimental in the title story, or when the balloonist’s quest gets metafictional. Despite the range, and the fact that the stories were written over 15 years, the subjects and settings provide a pleasing unity. The grand pleasures of fiction are all here: rich, cushioning detail; vivid characters delivering decisive action; and a sense of escape into a larger world. The best story of all, though, might be one of interior drama. “The Second Doctor Service” is a tale of possession that stands comparison with Maupassant’s terrifying “The Horla”, and reminds us that before we face our foes, first we must battle ourselves.

• A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth by Daniel Mason is published by Mantle (RRP £14.99).