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Themes of love and loneliness, doom and desire are explored in a richly comic collection from an Irish maestro
“Here’s a very old joke – Cause of Death: the west of Ireland.” The misfits and mavericks who people Kevin’s Barry’s third short story collection are as vulnerable as ever to that landscape’s “glamorous and drunk making” aspect; the wild, doomy, transporting strain that runs from the punky dystopia of his Impac-winning debut novel, City of Bohane, through the Goldsmiths winner Beatlebone and on to last year’s tragicomic Night Boat to Tangier. “This place could wreak fucking havoc on a man’s prose if you let it,” remarks the narrator of “Old Stock”, who inherits his uncle’s cottage facing the Bluestack Mountains. It’s a story brimming with both the desire for and the fear of strong feeling, handled with a loose, supple comedy. His change in circumstance threatens some test or transformation for the narrator; rapture and resignation compete, and in the end he backs away. “I knew well I was a maggot.”
Elsewhere the drama between individual and setting unfolds as fable, as shaggy dog story, or as country and western ballad. In the title story, a pregnant teenager parked up in a forest awaits the outcome of her boyfriend’s unwise heist on a petrol station. “Her man in jail and a child at the breast – it was all playing out by the chorus and verse.” In “Ox Mountain Death Song”, a romp of a story with a sting in its tail, a guard is on the trail of a local ne’er do well who’s been “planting babies all over the Ox Mountains since he was 17 years old”. Sergeant Brown’s darkest attribute appears at first to be a sweet tooth; as he pursues the charismatic young Canavan, he sucks honey from a squeezable tub. Barry holds myth-making and dull reality in teasing balance, with a kind of comic double vision winking at the operatic and the bathetic by turns. Generations pass in the shadow of the mountains, “and only the trousers changed”, from sackcloth, gabardine and denim on to “the nylon trackpant, and then to the cotton sweats”. Whitethorn trees encroach into nearly every story, whether foaming with blossom or waving gnarly branches, carrying their aroma of death and magic. Fate, doom and disaster are lightly invoked, and swiftly brought down. Continue reading...