No doubt, his war experiences influenced this move to England for he had served in the RCAF during WWII in a Lancaster Squadron based in Yorkshire. Once he returned to England after his years at McGill, he seemed to get swallowed up in the life in St. Ives, and his stories of the west counties mirror this. Consequently, he became a far better known literary figure in England than in Canada, although he has been back and forth between the two countries, and in-between also lived in France.

Now in his 80^th year, this writer has given us another collection of his stories that are both fiction and  autobiography . Some are set in and around Ottawa, some on the coast of Devon, even London, but most take place in and around St. Ives, a Cornwall fishing town that began to attract the artsy crowd soon after war’s end, and still has a reputation for being an artist colony.

His characters are not particularly likeable, nor are they especially memorable. Yet, they touch you, in part because their lives are so ordinary, often full of failure or unfulfilled dreams. Levine knows how to give shape to their discontents, their disappointments, and their occasional successes. But, mostly they touch us because Levine knows how to create believable characters, or how to describe characteristics that give shape to the very ordinariness of everyday life and everyday people, who could just as easily be ourselves. For we all are, in some way, ordinary.

One doesn't need to be familiar with the places that Levine writes about in his stories, but if one is, that familiarity gives an extra edge to the already beautifully crafted images he is able to create. Unlike so many other short story writers, who merely sketch in the surroundings of a story, he knows how to paint with words, how to make a setting come alive, whether it be here on our own home turf, or in those far off places on the other side of the Atlantic.

Levine's stories remind me why I chose in the early '60s not to follow the call to St. Ives, and instead settled in London for a few years. The characters that inhabit St. Ives in Levine's stories, many of them ex-pats, confirm what I had felt instinctively those many years ago.

There were too many romantics drawn to the place, who were more running away from life than toward it. And, too many were people known to me from home. It was not something I wanted. That he remained there himself for 31 years seems amazing. Yet, he obviously managed to escape the pretensions and doldrums of an ex-pat colony, which can be utterly destructive to ones creative forces. It shows that he is made of sterner stuff than most and knows how to survive such a place.

There are 15 stories in The Ability to Forget. The title story happens to be the last in the book. The narrator of the tale meets an old air force squadron leader, whose failing memory ensures that he cannot tell the difference between what actually happened and what his failing mind imagines. The last two lines of the story tell it all:

"Later a For Sale sign appeared by his home. Then the Sold sign.
People disappear. And that's that."

Levine reminds us how quickly we accept change in our surroundings, of people leaving or dying, of forgetting or disregarding what before seemed important. We all have an uncanny ability to forget.