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Coloured by nostalgia for painful pasts, this is a collection narrated by middle-aged men for whom time and memory have become pliable. Tragedies occur at quite a rate. In Icebergs, Abby loses a child, suffers from cancer and suffers marriage difficulties. The short story is not a large enough literary form to accommodate all three events. Tragedy must be qualitative, not quantitative. In the collection's best story, We Are Not Made of Stone, James comes to prefer novels of characterisation to those of plot. This is a false dichotomy that points up the main weakness of O'Callaghan's stories: they seem uninterested in formal adventure. Each one starts in the present, leaps back into the past and then dutifully returns with another didactic cliche at the ready. "Life might really be less about the destination than the journey," says one character. But when the journey and the destination are always the same, it probably isn't worth the bother.
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