SHORT STORIES: HEATHER INGMANreviews Old Swords and Other StoriesBy Desmond Hogan The Lilliput Press, 138pp, €14.99
IT'S HARD to convey to younger readers what Desmond Hogan's books meant to those who were young in Ireland in the 1970s, when Hogan was part of the new generation of Irish writers that was going to shake up the establishment. Among their number was Neil Jordan who co-founded the Irish Writers' Co-operative, which published Hogan's first novel, The Ikon Maker, in 1976.
Hogan's first short story collection, The Diamonds at the Bottom of the Sea(1979), with its tales of young people crossing Europe and America to conduct fleeting affairs, its insight into the lives of travellers, loners and homosexuals, above all its risky use of language and dazzling range of literary reference, issued a challenge to readers reared on Frank O'Connor and Seán Ó Faoláin, to rethink their concept of the Irish short story. By the early 1980s, Hogan seemed to hold the future of Irish writing in his hands.
Hogan never did join the establishment. The stories in his latest collection, Old Swords and Other Stories, continue to deal with the lives of Irish marginals: music hall artistes, bohemian garda sergeants, a teacher who manages to inspire in at least one of her pupils a love of Proust and Flaubert, an Aids victim, suspected pornographers and various species of alienated youth. Hogan's Ireland has always been more diverse than official histories would let us suspect. With Hogan's characteristic blend of lyrical intensity and detailed realism, each of these lives is set in the context of its time, ranging from the 19th century to the present day, wrinkling out along the way forgotten fragments of the Irish story – the recreation of Parnell's life in London music halls, for instance, or the drowning of Irish hop pickers in Kent in 1853.
Though he has never been parochial, Hogan has as much knowledge of Ireland as anyone writing today. His characters find themselves defeated by the conditions of Irish life: the garda sergeant’s archives are seized, the teacher’s artistic taste declines from Morisot and Delacroix to Laura Ashley wallpaper, the art lover is reported to the police, the leukaemia victim commits suicide.
The themes, however, have been updated. Shelterassesses whether England is a place of refuge or a prison for Irish emigrants, a subject that goes back to Hogan's story, Memories of Swinging London, in Children of Lir(1981), but the references are bang up to date: Eminem, Damien Duff, Cristiano Ronaldo. War is still one of his subjects, but now it's the war in Afghanistan ( Oystercatcher).
There's less anger perhaps, more lyricism than there used to be, fewer suicides and fewer spells in mental hospitals for his characters. They seem to be better at getting by. Yet there is an irony. Whereas sex was often furtive and repressed in Hogan's earlier portraits of Ireland, now there is plenty to be found, though little love: "But love," reflects the narrator of Oystercatcher, "what is this love? What is this word? I heard it once".
Hogan is a writer well worth keeping faith with and he is on form in this collection. If none of the stories finally wrings the reader's heart, like Jimmyin The Diamonds at the Bottom of the Sea, this is because he seems to be going for something different in this collection. He gives us not portraits of rounded individuals, but a postmodern exploration of the fragility of identity through the icons, the pictures, the stories his characters live by and which help them make sense, or not, of the world. The House of Mourningdescribes the random fragments of knowledge and memory that shore up the life of an Irish teenager before he becomes the latest stab victim.
Many of the characters' memories are enriching; others, like Sudsy's in Oystercatcherpoint up the detritus of modern life: "Funland . . . bells and whistles, millennial logos, baseball hats . . . Megabytes . . . a surfeit of technology, most of the faces on Bebo or Facebook – Sudsy's was too – a deficit of love and friendship."
Hogan has always been a seanchaí for his tribe, reflecting us back to ourselves or perhaps, to update the description more appropriately for this collection, a rapper rapping out seemingly unconnected paragraphs linked by single words or images that coalesce to convey the inner lives of his characters. There is an oral quality to his prose: the opening sentence of Iowa, building up to an entire paragraph, begs to be read aloud. The dodgy dialogue that often let him down in the past is gone. The images are tighter. He has dropped some of the wilder excesses of what Denis Donoghue once called his "fancy style" and found a fine balance between concision and lyricism. The descriptions of nature, of which there are many, are, as ever, both beautiful and precise.
Hogan has been a trailblazer for modern Irish writing, acknowledged by the likes of Colm Tóibín and Colum McCann. It is to be hoped this collection will reach a new generation of readers. In an age of sound bite and cliche Hogan sets the standard both in his use of language and his intensely individual vision. He demonstrates that, at its artistic best, the short story is as rich and demanding as poetry.
Heather Ingman lectures in the School of English, Trinity College, Dublin. Her most recent book, A History of the Irish Short Story, was published earlier this summer by Cambridge University Press
