It's one of the merits of the short story form that, in the hands of the right person, it can have the instant, potent force of a sledgehammer. Reading the debut collection Big Mouth, it becomes apparent that the literary world has one more such person on its hands in Irish author Blanaid McKinney. McKinney is a master of the voice and of language, her writing sharp, layered and exquisitely controlled, never more so than in the shocking title story.
Here, the cold, dispassionate voice of the IRA informer narrator counterpoints the horror of the story's conclusion, his fascination with language only serving to highlight the unspeakable nature of his fate. Facing up to the unthinkable, or indeed the unsayable, is a recurring theme: in "Sub-Aqua", a woman has to deal with her Tube driver husband's mute anguish after a young woman commits suicide by leaping under his train; in "Please", a young father steels himself for the desolate task of taking his infant daughter off a life-support machine; an immaculate businessman exacts revenge on the car that killed his wife and ruined his life in "Transmission". There is little or no mercy in such stories, save for the bitter epiphanies of the central characters and their Pyrrhic victories over individual torment, but in McKinney's sure hands it is the power of such moments rather than their horror or hopelessness that burns itself into the reader's imagination.
There is also some relief. The varying lives and faces of punters drifting through an early afternoon pub entertain in "Tie, Coat, Hat" while the happy resolution of differences and family history forms the action of "Among the Gadje". Whatever her subject matter, and it is wide-ranging and highly original in these 11 stories, McKinney always exhibits an impressive sureness of touch and, occasionally, an intensity that is impossible to pin down or forget.
Catherine Heaney is books editor of Image magazine