Every picture tells a story. Take the photograph on the cover of this crop of nine new and 10 republished stories by Evelyn Conlon. It shows a young couple. He has his arm draped loosely around his girl, is gazing into the middle distance and seems relaxation personified. She, on the other hand, nuzzles close to him, only has eyes for him, though her expression is questioning and expectant. The stories in Telling read like a set of variations on this snapshot, with characters slithering up and down "the moral mountain" of various types of relationships - familial, marital and co-habitational, as well as those between siblings and friends.
The majority of the characters belong to "the runaway generation", and it's an expression of their emotional energy and the ways in which it is thwarted or devalued that exile is a recurring plot development. Not that exile is necessarily a solution. It can be, as in the case of Norah in "A Night Out" making a new life for herself in Paris, or for Anne Marie McGurran, who seeks "a new desert within which to put her heart" in "Escaping the Celtic Tiger, World Music and the Millennium". On the other hand, when Brendan Gaffney in "Petty Crime" panics and flees to Liverpool, his wife follows and points out the folly of his action. And in "Two Good Times" it seems that Gregory and Constance will complete back home what they were unable to consummate when they travelled Australia together.
But Telling isn't really interested in exile, except insofar as it's an outcome of more fundamental estrangements and departures. Breakdown, dislocation, rejection constitute the stories' basic material, and in the often neutral settings of restaurants and flats and open spaces in which they take place there's a strong undercurrent of homelessness, which is sometimes reinforced by the role of parents and more often by the part played by the smug peer-group from whom the typical Conlon protagonist is isolated. Yet it's not so much the material itself that's noteworthy but the response of many of the protagonists to it.
These invariably female protagonists may be down. They may even appear to be out, thanks to being alone, denied or deprived by the men in their lives - their "no-oneness". But out they certainly are not. On the contrary, they embody - usually by retaining an unrepentant, and frankly articulated, grip on the distinctiveness of their sexuality - a subversive resilience. The emotional wounds they suffer become the pretext not merely for starting their adult lives over but for doing so in such a way as to rise above the limiting moral and sexual structures that underwrote their relationships. And the opposite to the rigidities of male power is an all-embracing anarchism which, in the author's enthusiasm, spreads beyond private life into certain social areas (the Pope's visit in "The Park"), and especially the social areas which carry a sexual inflection, such as clerical conjugality ("The Last Confession") and adoption ("Birth Certificates"). It even spreads into the literary scene, not only in the writing class of the title story, but in the impish references to Brian Friel ("The Sound of Twin") and T. Kinsella ("The Tour"), not to mention the dressing down of Henry Miller ("Taking Scarlet as a Real Colour" - as in scarlet woman).
Interesting as the anarchistic imperative is as a theme, however, it becomes less engaging when it's adapted as a narrative method. As a result, many of these stories are shapeless. Development is arbitrary, characterisation can be one-dimensional, there's a surplus of flashback, retrospect and judgement. The "hurtful intimacy", which we're told denotes the short story is here a matter of the author's rather forceful attitude towards her characters, conveyed by an almost sermonising omniscience. Such reservations reveal God only knows what kind of male hangups, no doubt. Still, it's difficult to shed the sense that if these stories consisted of less matter with more art they would have been more telling.
George O'Brien's most recent book is Playing the Field: Irish Writers on Sport, just published by New Island Books