First, foremost: this is a brilliant and remarkable book, a collection of six short stories by a debut writer that immediately asks to be considered among this island’s signal 21st-century literary achievements. Who is Liadan Ní Chuinn? Diligent googling turns up the information that they are “a writer from the north of Ireland” (and that they use they-them pronouns). They have published in literary journals: Granta, Tolka, The Stinging Fly. That’s about it. No age given, no previous career. Now, a first book. As I say, a brilliant and remarkable one.
Short stories are where writers typically begin but there is an irony inherent in this state of affairs. Of all literary forms the short story most exactingly demands that you know the world, know people. Young writers typically know literature far better than they know the world, and they almost always know their own hungers far better than they know people. (How many empty first books are written out of mere hunger to write a book?) But here is a writer who knows a great deal more than a debut writer usually does; who, moreover, has integrated this knowledge into their way of seeing.
Six stories, all of them quite long, but none of them quite approaching the formal status of novella. The length is part of the effect. This is a book of short stories that does not understand life as containable within the limits of “the short story”. It is also very much a book and not an anthology. The stories are linked not just by style but by shared deep resonances of theme, method, symbol. The parts make a whole.
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“My parents were hijacked before I was born”: this is the opening sentence of the first story, We All Go. The setting is Derry. Jackie, a medical student, grieves for his father, Michael Madigan, who has died of cancer. Jackie attends anatomy classes where he is instructed in the dissection of human bodies. He broods obsessively about “the things the British Army did to the hundreds of civilians they took away and held captive, held without charge[.]” Jackie’s grandfather, after whom he is named, was interned. “I don’t know what these things did to Michael Madigan.”
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How to End a Story: Collected Diaries by Helen Garner review – ‘small, random stabs of extreme interestingness’ captured on the page
In summary this story, and the other five stories in the book, sound like – well, like short stories. Not easy to convey in a brief review the ways in which these stories open out and close again in strange folds and planes. They operate like some theoretical shape in geometry that has more surfaces than are physically possible – they are Escher houses, Klein bottles. Or human minds, perhaps.
The second-person protagonist of Mary loses her job and takes a creative writing class in a local church. She tries obsessively to write the story of a little girl who lives, as far as she can tell, on the bus “you” take every day. The protagonist is married to a taxi driver who, halfway through the story, tells her he has taken a huge fare from three young women who were obviously being trafficked by gangsters. You wait for these fictive elements to dovetail; but the story has other, richer plans.
In Russia, a young man, adopted as a child from Russia by abusive parents, visits a psychic and unearths his childhood trauma. But “unearths” is not quite right. The shape of the story is not a burrowing-under – the conventional “trauma plot” – but rather a demonstration that the experience of rupture is continuous with its own aftermath. The present is the past. The dead are not gone. “Every one is still here.”
In Daisy Hill, the book’s final story, Rowan, a young man, reads obsessively about what the British Army did to Catholics during the Troubles. His friend Shane says, “you remember fuck all, you’ve just got this obsession with history.” Rowan replies, “How the fuck is it history?” Just so. Even more profoundly, Daisy Hill, in telling the Troubles as the story of an armed state killing and torturing a subject population, becomes about now, and specifically about what Israel is doing in Gaza. Rowan writes desperately to himself, “again and over: I would care if this were done to you.”
The classic short story is teleological, pointed towards a single end (twist, epiphany). These short stories are anti-teleological. They are about process. They understand life and death as processes, and they represent this state of process-ness in a prose that is itself a kind of process: not finished or aphoristic or lyrical but instead associative, sometimes jagged with repetition or non sequitur, a prose that gives the past and the present an equal reality, an equal presence on the page. In this extraordinary capacity to embody process – in this context, another word for human consciousness – lies the essence of this superb book’s quietly radical realism.
Kevin Power is an author, critic and lecturer in creative writing at Trinity College Dublin
