Elementals by A. S. Byatt

As I've mentioned before, I find Byatt's writing really hit-and-miss. I keep hoping for good short stories from her after The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye, which I really liked, but this collection was pretty disappointing. She sometimes has an extremely annoying writing style that I feel like she purposefully adopts because she images it's 'innovative' and 'visceral' (or any other word the New York Times book review will favour), but which I find just irritating. She uses really short sentences that are probably meant to be stark and meaningful, but to me just feel weak and silly. There's a lot of magical realism in this collection, from a jaded 1980s artist who finds a water-spirit in his swimming pool, to an ice princess who falls in love with a desert-dwelling prince, but it all sort of fell flat for me. There's a lot of exploration of female sexuality that was done over at least three times in the 1970s. The one really exceptional short story in the collection is 'Jael', which is a fascinatingly creepy story about a sort of casual, daily kind of evil. It's also the story in which Byatt sticks closest to reality: post-war, small-town England, school friendships, modern careers. Perhaps her writing would be greatly improved if she tried a little less hard to be edgy and original, because 'Jael' proves that she can be effortlessly so. I'd say that was the only story worth reading, but it was an astoundingly good one.