The song is ended but the malady lingers on

Christopher Priest finds Yann Martel's collection of short stories, The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios, full of longueurs
The Facts behind the Helsinki Roccamatios by Yann Martel
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The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios
by Yann Martel
239pp, Canongate, £9.99

This collection of short stories was first published more than a decade ago, when the Canadian writer Yann Martel was unknown to just about everyone but his family. Since then there has been the novel Life of Pi, winner of the Booker prize in 2002, which went on to sell all over the world. Presumably because there is no sign of a sequel, the publishers have reprinted his first book in an attractive hardcover edition. You can't exactly blame them for trying to plug the hole in the market.

For many readers, this one among them, Life of Pi left rather a gaping hole of its own in the credibility department. Fortunately, the stories in this book are more solidly based in recognisable reality, but the tone of voice is still reminiscent of the novel. Martel writes plain prose with surface adornments. Some times the extra level is sentimental, sometimes too many details appear, sometimes the author makes an implied request to the reader for confirmation of his ideas: isn't that so? You know what I mean? And so on. His writing is pleasant enough, but there's a sweetness that sticks around afterwards.

The best of the stories here is called "The Time I Heard the Private Donald J Rankin String Concerto with One Discordant Violin, by the American Composer John Morton". In spite of its laborious title, "The Time ..." turns out to be a likeable and well-told story about the discovery in a disused Washington DC theatre of an obscure American composer, scraping away on his battered violin. During the orchestral performance that is at the heart of this story the narrator can't keep himself from drifting mentally, lost in a plausible-seeming reverie of current events (a strike at Eastern Airlines) and a novel by Conrad (Almayer's Folly). Later the narrator discovers that the composer works as a janitor in a bank building, scraping a living. If there's a point it is a subtle one, about the ephemeral quality of achievement, how near one can come, how far away it often is.

Much less successful is the title story. The eponymous family are Italian immigrants in Finland, and they are imagined into existence by two young men: one is dying of Aids, the other is his companion. The Roccamatios feature, Zelig-like, in most of the pivotal historical events of the 20th century, and as the boy slowly dies the two of them take it in turns to attach a historical anecdote to each year. They get as far as 1961, but long before then the reader is anxiously consulting the calendar, counting how many of these tedious years still lie ahead.

The two remaining entries are as slight as the title story, but much shorter. "Manners of Dying" takes the form of a series of official letters from a prison warden to the mother of an executed prisoner, describing the last 24 hours of the young man's life. The warden appears to have written at least 1,000 of these letters, all numbered and all marginally different from each other. Martel's short story contains a selection of nine of them. Is he against capital punishment, or isn't he? It's impossible to tell.

The final story, "The Vita Æterna Mirror Company: Mirrors to Last till Kingdom Come", is one of those efforts with experimental typography that is apparently intended to draw the fire of the philistines. Well, here goes: if anyone else wants to try to find meaning in a story which several hundred times prints the line "blah-blah-blah-blah" they're welcome to try. Somewhere in the white space surrounding this nonsense there is a hint of a real story, about love and mirrors, but in the end the deliberate obscurity becomes its own end.

· Christopher Priest's The Separation is published by Gollancz