ON reading these collections, which between them contain short stories, poems, novellas, science fiction, contemplative pieces and fables, one is led to query the function of the collections as a form. Either as separate pieces of writing they ought not to be associated with one another and should stand in their own right, or they have been collected into single volumes because it is hoped that the various parts together will produce an overall message.
Clearly, to insist that either the stories are separate or the books are whole is an extreme position, but in the case of Harte and Mac Lochlainn it is deliberately so. Their stories and other pieces invite a certain kind of reading that can be best described as two-dimensional. By this I mean that these stories have meanings attached to them, more or less clearly signposted by their authors, which form a second dimension lying beneath the surface narrative. The words we use to describe these themes seem, in their gravitas, to demand capital letters: Memory, Subjectivity, Love, Truth, etc. Thus both collections promise that, when read as a whole, they will each yield a single "Meaning".
The alternative is to read the stories and other pieces each on its own terms, thus begging the question why they are brought together between a single set of covers. Maybe it's simply a feature of the publishing industry that collections make more economic sense than trying to publish short pieces individually, but the fact that stories are lumped together has aesthetic implications which must be addressed.
In the end, I think that the pieces in both books would be better read in isolation from one another. Such a reading liberates the reader from being too conscious that the authors are attempting to posit, some higher purpose or more general scheme into which everything must fit.
More specifically, of these two books The Corpus in the Library probably comes nearer to breaking out into a mode of meaning that is something more than two-dimensional. The first, title, story, achieves this to some extent, but this may be due less to the strength of the story than to the echoes of Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman, on which it is modelled. Unsurprisingly for one with the background of a librarian, Mac Lochlainn is at his strongest when he imitates or parodies other formal styles.
This is a learned collection, dealing in intellectual conundrums that at times unsettle yet will also intrigue the reader, an effect that is, I would guess, intentional.
Jack Harte's characters in Birds and Other Tails are either nameless types, or are made specific by the minutiae of their lives with which their creator surrounds them. Correspondingly, Harte hovers between abstraction and a gritty realism, and is at his best when he sticks to the latter. The most compelling stories, such as "The Great Silence" and "Australia", are those in which Harte mixes absolute mundanity with a sense of the absurd, producing the grisly yet attractive atmosphere of a fairy tale. Nevertheless, when one looks back over the collection it is difficult to distinguish these twenty stories one from another. The book's impact is, it seems, designed to be cumulative; the collection aims to add up to more than the sum of its parts.
A third anthology of short stories, Dublin Stories: A New Collection, with an introduction by Brendan Kennelly, comprises twenty pieces by relatively unknown authors. After the two previous collections, the deliberate plainness and straightforwardness achieved by many of these stories is a relief. The theme of Dublin is hardly adhered to at all, but there is a concern with homes and houses on the part of almost all the authors. This is due, I suppose, to the fact that the Irish short story is often concerned with Irish domestic life and a sense of the everyday. A more immediately enjoyable book than those by Harte and Mac Lochlainnt.
