Customer Reviews

The Best New Irish Short Stories 2005

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As with any anthology, the results are mixed. Like the chocolate assortment, you devour some hungrily, taste some others cautiously, chew some dutifully once you've started them, and a few you toss aside or quietly dispose of tactfully. I wish the veteran publisher and man of letters David Marcus had told us where these "best new" stories had originated. I presume "first time in print" means that the authors submitted them to him for selection? I mention this since it does seem a jumble of established and less-known writers, and his brief introduction sheds no light on how these were gathered or commissioned.

Since they are then joined here only by fact of the authors being born in (or in a few cases Irish American or Irish in Britain) Ireland, there's no other reason. The Irishness of the selections varies, but with the exception of a couple, few of these recalled the short-story Chekhovian influences that inspired the past century's canonical Irish tale-tellers. One of the contributors, Gerard Donovan, seemed surprised after a reading of his new novel (Julius Winsome-- also reviewed by me), that none of us asked him why he did not write about Ireland. For him, it simply holds no interest. Many of the stories in this volume also reveal little of the local lore and the evocations of nature or the tensions of politics and warfare that the previous two generations of Irish storytellers would have been expected to address in their efforts. A sign of cultural maturity? Rejecting sectarianism? Or testimony to the Anglo-American consumer hegemony that has been embraced by the Irish themselves?

I wondered if the story arrangement would reveal such resonance in the sequential order, but I could not find this. So, reach in and judge which ones you think are worth the effort of pulling up. As Amazon has a "search inside" feature and you can call up the table of contents, I will mention only the authors' names, not the titles of their stories. These are the ones, roughly in order of their appearance, that I thought most worthy of preserving:

Roddy Doyle in clipped, no-nonsense fashion, takes us inside the mind of an Irish (presumably by the diction) man approaching middle age whose wife appears to be about to leave him. Gerard Donovan also takes us into the mind of a Midwestern middle-aged man whose sanity has, we slowly realize, left him, although naturally he is unaware of this condition. Both writers offer well-rounded characters, efficient use of details, and know when to shift up and shift down as they control their narratives. Both Doyle and Donovan compress characteristic qualities that mark their novels, with the literary language deceptively transparent at times only to bring us in and trap us with its true opacity.

Hugo Hamilton in his two full-length memoirs has delved tangentially into how Ireland exports its self-image through its kitsch. In a well-honed yet very short story "The Homesick Industry," he neatly pits the emergence of Hamilton's present-day advanced and globalizing Ireland against the products it manufactures that depend upon its romanticization of an austere and harsh peasant culture. He literally wraps up his story.

Colum McCann gives a brief vignette of a boy taken from a war-torn land to safety; George O'Brien includes in his long story a man escaping his Balkan homeland and German violence to find not only asylum but a vigorous suitor in a tale that, if for me was too shaggy-dog and galumphing and just plain too long, most reminiscent in its details and dialogue of the earlier tale-telling tradition of O'Faolain and O'Connor.

Neil Jordan also recalls 20c tradition; his take on Othello is clever, with the narrator's voice appealingly irritating, while the end reminded me of Nabakov's "And In Aleppo Once." Colm Tóibín relates deftly the aftermath of a mother's funeral with the realization by the son of his sudden attraction, after a rave on a Wicklow beach, for one of his male friends. Mary Burke nods to Borges in her sly and wry fable that spins off of the ancient myth of "Hy-Brasil"; Niall Williams tries, if less memorably, to capture the "tale-told-to-me-by-a..." aura with what adds up to an old-fashioned story with a moral, that takes place on the Peruvian-Bolivian frontier.

I never thought I'd be that interested in a story that veers away from an a love affair to a Himalayan mountaineering challenge, but Dermot Somers applies his real-life skill as a climber to verbally maneuver our way with caution through what proves to be quite a gripping adventure. The contrast between the Dublin city past and the raw icy present makes for a bracing and intriguingly handled account. I felt like I entered a chapter from a much longer novel about the climbers, and the depth of what at first read appears a straightforward story is considerable.

A couple of other stories held even if for me they did not sustain their initial promise; others may rank these higher. Molly McCluskey observes sharply the details of blaring and assaultive, jittery Dublin as a city crammed with inhabitants who appear to wish desperately to differ little from anxious (post-)moderns in any other trafficked and tech-driven metropolis. Claire Keegan's fairy-tale told within what seems an endless story appealed more to me than the larger narrative. William Wall's set-up of a translator happy in his Mediterranean retirement and the incongruity of his translating Dante's Inferno, with its echoes of the distant North of Ireland and its gentle satire of the publishing world enriches his story, even if as a taut narrative it seemed to me too slack.

Edna O'Brien in her impressive style recalls Molly Bloom's ruminations on love and lust, although the story erodes under the fluidity of the steady prose. Blánaid McKinney and Mary Morrisy follow suit with their evocations of, respectively, an embittered TV weather reporter and a child's dressing up in mom's clothes. Both writers pile up images and descriptions with exactitude and delight, and even if their stories also were subsumed for me within the language, the language is a delight.

These are some of the 23 entries. Although any collection's nearly certain to have its hits and misses, these vary with the reader. Look up the TOC on Amazon and cherry, or chocolate-, pick your own favorites.