The pieces, all pleasantly readable, in Alex Mizzi’s new publication Sbieħ il-Ħadd (Klabb Kotba Maltin, ISBN 978-99932-7-630-2) are short stories or sketches. All of them show people in today’s Malta, dealing with new or old social or emotional problems and throw light on how these people call on, or sometimes ignore, the Catholic principles on which they have been brought up. The overall picture is of a Malta that has changed fast in the past decades and is still changing.
The first piece, one with a well-developed plot, is about an old teacher in an old people’s home who was once guilty of trying to abuse a pupil. The narrator, an ex-pupil, pities him and strives to instil in the teacher’s former victim a sense of forgiveness for a man who has now discovered true love to the point of even donating a bodily organ to a sick man, and is a thoroughly reformed man.
Perhaps the most memorable character in the collection is the narrator in Madeline. He is gradually revealed by the author to be a priest who is allowing his lustful thoughts to dominate him, to the extent that even when saying Mass his thoughts are not of the sacred rite but of the person with whom he is obsessed. He is clearly now a priest solely in name. The ending of the story gives the plot an additional and chilling twist.
Mizzi also handles well a situation that has become fairly common in our time: the discovery and reaction of Maltese parents to discovering that a child of theirs is homosexual. In Claude, the gay son outs himself soon after his heterosexual marriage that had brought so much joy to his parents. The author uses a conversation between the father and the narrator of the story to show both the very conservative views of the father, as well as the narrator’s, and presumably the author’s, view that true love by parents should lead to understanding and continued affection in such a situation. The ending is perhaps too didactic – the narrator makes it clear that his view does not necessarily entail a moral approval.
The author’s sadness as he sees how Maltese mores have changed in modern times, appears in two stories: L-Aħħar Dawl and Ir-Raħal. In the latter, he uses a familiar device, that of a native Maltese who revisits his native land after many years. While, as a whole, he discovers Malta much changed, he finds much less change in his native village, leading him to realise how he himself has changed so much as to feel like an alien in the place where he was born and bred. Back in his adopted country he tells his family he doubts if he will ever revisit Malta. There is very little narrative in this piece, but it is vivid, nonetheless.
In Ismael, the author appears to be a straightforward treatment of the relationship between a woman and the African child she and her late husband have adopted, but he then develops the plot to reach one of his favourite final surprises. The dialogue between the child Ismael and his adoptive mother is handled with some subtlety.
The title story is a bit short on plot. The narrator is a Catholic with little of his faith left even if, like perhaps many others, he plans to start practising his faith once more when he retires and, presumably, will then have much fewer things leading him astray. He has not been very charitable and is suspicious of beggars of all sorts, but it is a particular beggar whom he meets more than once, that begins to prey on his conscience. As so often with this author, it is the close of the story that makes the reader truly enter the narrator’s mind.
The ending of the story L-Ingliża is too contrived, and Il-Kapsula which is about a person being prepared for a surgical procedure, perhaps a colonoscopy, is lively enough, but more of a sketch than a story.
Wilfred Sapiano is about two males, the narrator and his school contemporary Wilfred Sapiano, whose family is much better off than that of the narrator and who constantly elicits the narrator’s envy. It is this envy that makes the narrator exult as an adult when Wilfred falls on poor financial times. The story brings out the strongly unchristian mentality of the narrator, and the conclusion leaves the reader with a bitter taste in the mouth.
The last story, Ħolm Ikreħ, is another one of the semi-plotless pieces, being in fact little more than a collection of bad dreams narrated by a group of friends spending a weekend together, and the dreams themselves sometimes seem to be too complex to sound convincing. They are surely meant as comments on the less than admirable Maltese society of our time, but the device is clumsy.