Exploration of our changing landscape is, in short, compelling 08
June 2013, Pat Boran, Irish Independent
Few anthologies of new writing
can be read as simply a 'gathering of flowers', as the original Greek might
suggest. In Ireland, perhaps more than elsewhere, a new collection of stories
is expected to be more than the sum of its parts, and must somehow describe the
present state of the nation and perhaps of Irishness itself.
If editor Kevin Barry's
introduction is a somewhat perfunctory one from a writer who can usually be
relied upon to engage, his claim for a genre "pulsing with great, mad and
rude new energies" is for the most part borne out by this selection of
well known and emerging names.
Leopold Bloom's assertion that
"A nation is the same people living in the same place" is sent up by
Ned Hynes ("If that's so I'm a nation for I'm living in the same place for
the past five years"). The notion is challenged here too, if not entirely
exploded, and Town & Country features stories set in Germany, Barcelona and
an unnamed island in the North Sea, among other locations, with one of the most
moving and troubling, by Desmond Hogan, having its emotional heart in the
post-conflict Balkans.
Even so, geography is a good
place to start, and location, properly explored, has often been relied upon to
produce story. Thus Town & Country, perhaps fittingly, opens in rural
Ireland, with Dermot Healy's typically dialogue-spare and suggestive piece
about a photographer visiting (revisiting?) ruins and abandoned houses in the
West. Though the historical view is longer, it is difficult not to see here
some echo of the more recent ruins and derelict buildings of the Irish
landscape.
One of the reasons why Ireland
may be a natural home to the short story again is that our society has
undergone such change in recent times. And change, whether above or just below
the surface, is what the story is best equipped to explore.
The most able writers know how to
zoom in on and frame those ongoing changes in precisely observed moments. Mike
McCormack's ‘A Winter Harmonic’ brings together a lorry crash and the discovery
of medical files, among other things, to tell the story of "how lives in a
small village hold together", while Nuala Ní Chonchúir, in a story that
has a hint of Roald Dahl about it, shows how the move for his wife into a
nursing home (with the creepy title Emerald Sunsets) is one change too many for
her doting husband.
Julian Gough's hyper-inventive
tale of an exiled Irishman's efforts to create a pop song "as addictive as
cocaine" is both extended riff and compelling fable and adds one of the
few truly playful notes to a mostly serious if not grim or grey volume.
Contemporary Ireland is, variously,
a country "where the young have the run of the place" (Colin Barret
in the powerful ‘The Clancy Kid’) or where Celtic Tiger cocktails come in
"oversized glasses filled a third of the way" (Eimear Ryan in ‘The
Recital’).
But it is also a place where so
many relationships are under strain and old models no longer trusted. Michael
Harding, in an affecting story of a man coming to terms with illness, sees an
unbridgeable gap between past and present in a country where "the church
is now so disgraced that all the buildings will probably be Omniplex cinemas by
the time I'm 75".
Making no prediction about the
future, the stories in Town & Country
instead offer a compelling if fragmented picture of where we are now.
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