Pond is a study of a life lived at the fringes of society, the thoughts of a woman who has chosen to live a simple reflective life alone in a stone cottage in the west of Ireland. If that evokes the image of a character in search of meaning, then think again. These twenty loosely linked stories do not purport to impart major insights on the human condition or answer any big questions – they just are. And that’s more than enough for this reader.

          The mouth in Beckett’s short play Not I speaks of a life in staccato bursts and each time it appears to be on the point of adopting the first person it hesitates and takes refuge once more in the third person. It feels like a form of self-protection, a distancing, the donning of a semantic suit of armour. In Claire-Louise Bennett’s short story sequence, right from the opening story Voyage in the Dark, we are introduced to the nameless, insistent female voice that inhabits the book. This voice emerges at the end of the single paragraph that comprises the story as one among a group of “little girls, there on the cusp of female individuation, not little girls for long”. There is no protection for this voice beyond herself, this child turned woman who inhabits the stories, who lays bare the inner workings of her consciousness morning, noon and night.

          The reason I refer to Beckett is because of the ostensible similarities in the writing styles of both authors. Each is concerned with what could be called the existential plight of the individual and takes great pains to describe in microscopic detail the minutiae of their characters’ daily lives. Both pass the time in listing inventories of items that they own or that they share a physical space with. Both writers create voices that are incredibly self-aware, perhaps overly so, alive to the changes of the surrounding natural world while at the same time grounded by the limits of the human body they inhabit and the immediate geography that confronts them. In these stories there is plenty of quotidian detail, on waking and rising, on bathing and eating. There is a sense of being on retreat from the world, of measuring past actions and events with the benefit of hindsight through the prism of distance. And there are bananas of course, a staple of Krapp’s diet also, the repast with which he commences his aural journeys to his earlier days in Krapp’s Last Tape. Bennett’s narrative unfolds at first in the style of a magazine column offering advice to the householder on organizing one’s day from dawn to dusk; what to eat, how to prepare and keep food fresh; all given in the quaint tone of an older female relative advising a younger woman starting out in life in the dim past.

          The sequential stories in Pond emerge as scenes in a play ordered randomly. In the case of Two Weeks Since the text bears a remarkable resemblance to Beckettian stage directions, which are at once descriptively precise and abstract: “Removes hat and whispers something. Whispers something again. Looks back, envies the deluge, moves into the long grass. Lets a van pass by.” The dark humour continues in Control Knobs, where the character frets about the fact that the knobs on her cooker are beginning to crack and she is forced to move the one remaining intact controller around the other three positions to continue using it. One is reminded of the scene in Waiting for Godot where Didi, Gogo and Pozzo exchange hats. Bennett goes on to compare her position to that of the main character in a novel she is reading who is the last remaining person alive; soon that character’s matches will be used up, then her bullets, so no more deer meat and no more milk when the cow dies. But our protagonist pulls herself up and admits that her predicament with the control knobs on her cooker is not quite as extreme as that of the woman who is the last person living on the planet. She returns to the cooker then, the Baby Belling, as used in thousands of bedsits all over the world. She considers the possibility of it being used to commit suicide and remarks with dry black humour knowing that she also must be included among the types she mentions: “You couldn’t kill yourself with a Baby Belling I shouldn’t think because as far as I know they are all powered by electricity and no doubt this specification was utterly deliberate because Belling would have been quite aware of the sorts of customers their product would invariably cater to and the sorts of morbid tendencies these people might brood over and wish to act upon and finally bring to completion”.

          But it is in the treatment of a character in solitude that Bennett and Beckett begin to part company. In Beckett the past is either to be forgotten or misremembered while in Bennett it is simply over. The character in Pond at times refers to events in her past; failed love affairs, previous careers or places where she has lived, but these memories are only important in so far as they impact on her current thoughts and preoccupations. In Morning, Noon and Night she moves from considering ideal breakfast foods to remembering how she kept a vegetable garden for a while (even though she is not a gardener) and how she abandoned it temporarily on receiving an invitation to present a paper at a University in London (even though she claims not to be an academic). Her subject is love. “The essential brutality of love”, as it has been portrayed in western literature, to be exact. She meets a man, a friend of the friend she is staying with, and embarks on a sexual relationship. Interestingly the relationship is maintained over time via email, as she embarks on an exchange of sexually frank missives which she considers to be out of character for her, yet at the same time she admits to finding the experience enervating.

          These stories from the woman’s past are important, firstly because they are true, but also because they arise in the moment in the mind of the main character. She appears to consider them neither more nor less important than other pieces of information imparted during the course of the narrative, for instance, instructions on the use black jam or flaked almonds as an accompaniment to breakfast porridge. In Bennett, unlike in Beckett, the isolated protagonist is relatively content in her solitude. She has freely sought out this quiet existence and calmly accepts the passing of the days as they come, noticing the mundane moments in her daily habits and in nature with equanimity. There is none of that sense of boredom or dread, of time being a void to be filled, that appears again and again in Beckett. In Malone Dies for instance the speaker, an old man near death, sets out a plan to expend the short time he has left alive. He does this by telling himself stories and by recounting an inventory of his possessions. In Pond, Bennett does not feel the need to tell stories to fill up the apparent emptiness of her narrator’s life. In fact, the emptiness, the solitude, is the story, is her life. Bennett herself is no stranger to being alone. She wrote in a piece for the Irish Times in 2015: “writing is a gloriously solitudinous place. And it was there, in that zone, I wanted to sink, without succumbing to the pull of narrative drive.”

          However, for a book that is concerned with being alone, with living by choice on the fringes of social interaction, the possibility of love, the possibility of sharing one’s life, is often considered. There is a yearning in the tone, right from the first child’s voice in Voyage in the Dark, that has been tempered by time’s passage by the time we meet the grown woman in Morning, Noon and Night. In a later story A Little Before Seven, the woman admits to a link between her alcohol consumption and her relations with men. In fact, she baldly states, “I rarely acquire any enthusiasm for the opposite sex outside of being drunk.” Having acknowledged this fact, she goes on to tease out the implications in the course of the story. She does not drink to make herself more confident and relaxed when flirting, as is commonly the case. “It is not mere confidence and conviviality that is sought during these vital sessions of artful libation, but the stimulation of a rather more sophisticated piece of kit.” What she seeks in drink is a kind of self-induced blindness to the superficial nature of the encounter with the other party: “a succession of perfectly pitched blind spots, or a persistent and delightful ringing in the ears… so that critical indifference is converted, rather niftily, into mindless fascination”.

          There is humour here, definitely, but great honesty also, to the point of obsessive self-interrogation. In another story, Morning, 1908, the psychological examination of the self is taken to extreme limits. Taking a walk outside after rain along the road, wearing only a raincoat over her night dress, she sees a young hooded man approaching. It is not usual to meet a man here, cars yes, but men no, and she is suddenly alarmed. Unable to control the panic she feels as the young man approaches she begins to imagine what it would be like if he raped her. “Would it be really such an upheaval – such a defiling affront? Perhaps on the contrary it might actually seem fairly recreational”. This is dark, certainly, but honest also in the context of the woman’s thought processes who on seeing the man approach, realising that there is no way to escape, imagines the various outcomes that might arise. As he gets closer she worries that she might urinate during the act. Then she sees herself through his eyes, her shabby boots, thick socks, the lace trim on her night dress, her damp unbrushed hair. “Nothing happened of course. I stood at a gate and a young man passed by. That was all.”

          The female first person point of view is so strong the reader is sucked completely into her view of the world. So much so, that when she fights with herself not say to the man in A Little Before Seven: “I only wish you could just spend five minutes beneath my skin and feel what it’s like”, you realise that we already know exactly how she feels. On reading Pond she makes us feel “the savage swarming magic” she feels.

          It’s no surprise that some readers have struggled with the lack of dramatic action in Bennett’s stories, in the same way that critics struggled with Beckett’s work in the past. Kenneth Tyan, writing in the Observer, said of Waiting for Godot in one of the more positive reviews of the play after its debut in London in 1955: “It has no plot, no climax, no denouement; no beginning, no middle and no end.” A trawl of reader comments on Goodreads throws up the occasional perplexed reader who couldn’t finish Bennett’s book, unable to deal with the lack of external action or the strong inner voice of Bennett’s protagonist. But this is far outweighed by reviews across the board that have been extremely positive. The popularity of such an ostensibly “difficult” book gives the lie to the theory that reading tastes have dumbed down in recent years. It heartens me to know that there is an audience out there for writing that is intelligent, darkly comic and subtle, which compels the reader to think conceptually beyond the mere pursuit of narrative structure and its implacable causality.