Openings by Lucy Caldwell: Enlightening and enriching collection of stories that closes a loose triptych

Openings

Author: Lucy Caldwell

ISBN-13: 9780571382750

Publisher: Faber & Faber

Guideline Price: £14.99

Sometimes the job of a critic is no job at all. So it is with Lucy Caldwell’s short stories, which leave the reader enlightened and enriched. This new collection is the third in a loose triptych charting the lives of female characters, and the occasional male, as they try to navigate relationships, career, motherhood and marriage in a changing world.

If Multitudes (2016) was a sharp-witted survival guide to female adolescence, and Intimacies (2021) shone brilliantly from the coalface of early motherhood, Openings continues the trajectory with a catalogue of stories focused on more mature relationships – a marriage stagnating after the toddler years, a separated family, a grandmother looking back through her grandsons to the mistakes she made as a mother. Throughout there is Caldwell’s trademark thoughtfulness and compassion, which manifests on the page as a longing for her characters to live well.

Caldwell, born in Belfast, is the author of four novels, several stage plays and three collections of stories. Though she is by no means unacclaimed – she won the BBC National Short Story Award in 2021, and previous awards include the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the Dylan Thomas Prize and the 2022 EM Forster Award – she flies somewhat under the radar and her stories, in particular, deserve more attention. Her oeuvre is very much in the vein of writers such as Tessa Hadley and Anne Enright, where extraordinary attention to detail makes the ordinary feel special or new.

In Openings we get to see, with a great sense of progression, what has become of the impressionable teenagers, the newly-weds, the sleep-deprived parents: who has thrived, who has survived, who has PTSD? In Something’s Coming, on a rain-soaked, properly Irish holiday, the growing distance between a couple turns into a horror episode in the dark, an ending that echoes a story from Intimacies where a mother wakes at night, fearing an intruder in her apartment.

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Style wise there is a shift away from the second person that worked so well in Intimacies, with many of the stories in Openings told in first or third. But the sense of connection remains, whereby Caldwell gently asks her readers to stop, listen and appreciate the world around them.

[ Lucy Caldwell: ‘It took me more than a decade of trying to write short stories before any of them worked. It was long and gruelling’ ]

Across the collection she explores the gap between how people behave and how they would like to behave. The grandmother in Daphne views her grandsons as “the chance to experience it as you wished it had been, in smaller doses”. In Unter den Linden, a writer at a festival in Berlin thinks of her children, cherishing the break, to chance to be away. Back home, “I knew I’d get exasperated with them, or cross, within minutes, even though they were all that mattered.”

In Openings, the poignant, beautifully observed story of a separation, a woman trying to rebuild her life searches for meaning: “The imam who took the classes before you got married said to always check your heart’s intentions: that what God looks at is the purity of the heart’s intentions.” Later she reads about a dolphin that closed over a blowhole after his human minder left him, preferring to die than withstand the loneliness. In Daylight Raids, which features an affair in wartime London, the narrator thinks, “Maybe all loves, all lives, are haunted by what they’ve never quite been, or managed to become.”

As with Caldwell’s previous collections, the stories in Openings lean more towards tension than drama. Bad things are often projected, imagined or inverted. There is a subtlety to her storytelling that sees life, good and bad, creep up on her characters, such as the grotesque, highly convincing exchange in Fiction between a young aspiring female writer and an older, self-important man. In Lay Me Down, first published in this paper, a brief encounter at a party makes a woman yearn for her husband, to tell him all the important things that somehow remain unsaid.

[ Lay Me Down: A Christmas short story by Lucy Caldwell ]

There is a wealth of original expression in Openings, a fine eye for the nuances of character, such as the ex-husband in the title story who is described as “playful, ironic, meaning it, but always ready to backtrack if anyone suggested he was being serious; always on the verge of being an impression of himself”.

Across the 13 stories as a whole, there is variety in race, religion, gender, age, which gives the overall impression of a writer looking outward. In the story Bibi, watching the prayers during Ramadan in Marrakesh, the narrator notes: “It feels ancient: it feels holy. It feels as if there are other ways you could be living your life.” The same can be said about Caldwell’s stories. Openings is a propulsive, expansive collection that invites the reader to think anew.