Kevin Barry presents a sly, raucous, knowing set of stories about characters who know themselves, even when they appear clueless, and who express themselves in a droll, slightly vulgar and glorious way, in Dark Lies the Island.
The story Fjord of Killary is a marvelous case in point.
A poet entering his midlife years buys an inn on a remote point of Irish coast. The area does not inspire him, the clientele do not enthrall him, it's all a wonder he hasn't given up on his rationing of his own alcohol intake. And now it appears it's flooding. The car park is under water. An otter has come into the kitchen looking for food. One gull rips the head off another one as they sit on a tree branch outside the bar window.
The action gets closer and closer to something genuinely morose as the bar inhabitants realize the futility of taking any action that does not involve lifting a glass or dancing. Then comes that last line in the story. How absolutely perfect.
The story accomplishes exactly what a short story should accomplish. It creates a world of its own that can be envisioned and has a point.
Another of my favorites is Wifey Redux. It features a nearly unreliable narrator except that he isn't. He's in on the joke about himself:
This is the story of a happy marriage but before you throw up and turn the page let me say that it will end with my faced pressed hard into the cold metal of the Volvo’s bonnet, my hands cuffed behind my back, and my rights droned into my ear – this will occur in the car park of a big-box retail unit on the Naas Road in Dublin.
It's a grand story because it chronicles what happens to a self-satisfied, self-contained young couple who grow into middle age and discovering it isn't the same as being young and in love. And now their daughter, the spitting image of herself, has a hot young boyfriend. What's a father to do? The risks Barry takes in having the story veer toward wholly unwholesome territory on more than one occasion is a marvel at how a writer can walk the high wire.
Ernestine and Kit has received praise. As a short story, it does fill Barry's goal of making a point. But it's also one of those stories from which I want to know more. These are two little old ladies who are trying to snatch a child. Have they done it before? To what purpose? Do they want to raise it or torment it? Why? How do two little old ladies get to that point?
Here they are looking for possible prey:
“Would they be hair extensions?” Kit wondered as they passed a young blonde pushing a pram along the roadside verge.
“You can bet on it,” Ernestine said. “The way they’re streaked with that silvery-looking, kind of…”
“Cheap-looking,” Kit said.
“Yes.”
“Gaudy!”
“A young mother,” Ernestine said.
“Got up like a tuppenny whore,” Kit said.
“The skirt’s barely down past her modesty, are you watching?”
“I am watching. And that horrible, horrible stonewash denim!”
“Where would the whore be headed for, Kit?”
Kit consulted the road map.
“Lechaun is the next place along,” she said. “Only a stretch up the road from here. Her ladyship is headed into a pub, no doubt.”
“Drinking cider with fellas with earrings and tattoos,” Ernestine said.
“In by a pool table. In a dank old back room. Dank!”
“You can only imagine,” said Kit, and she made the sign of the cross.
“A jukebox and beer barrels and cocaine in the toilets. The misfortunate infant left to its own devices.”
Barry won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. This is the first of his work I've read, and it all made me want to know more. Here's an excellent interview he gave published by
The Paris Review. I was especially delighted to see that sense of place means something to him, it being one of my most-admired tropes. The fjord story is especially redolent of it, but you can see sense of place at work in the others. There is a bit of the political between the two Irelands and Ireland and Britain, but this is a far more personal than political collection. The political in it stems from the personal.
As Barry notes:
Literature above all is a mode of transport. It lifts you up out of whatever situation you’re in and it puts you down somewhere else.
That's exactly what his stories accomplished for me. He's got another story collection,
There are Little Kingdoms, and a novel,
City of Bohane. I look forward to discovering the riches in them.
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