Short treasure chest unlocked

THAT simple sentence from Elizabeth Bowen’s Summer Night might indicate the requirement for inclusion in this, or in any, book of short stories. It might also serve as a hint of the breach between the older writers and the younger, a distance which Man Booker prizewinner Anne Enright has to bridge in her selection of 31 short stories representing some of the best work of Irish authors.

Summer Night was published in 1941, the year in which Bowen began her life-long adulterous affair with the Canadian diplomat Charles Ritchie. In this exploration of addiction, resignation and adultery, Bowen expresses some of the excitement and duplicity of intimate betrayals. Although it may be too daring to hope that in some way that emerging relationship is reflected in the shape and scope of the story, Bowen at least exemplifies the advantage older writers have over younger ones: experience. That is what transforms the actual into the visionary, what places the observer — and the writer — in that peculiar territory of insight.

Visions of where we are, examined with what Virginia Woolf called the passion to describe, are the business of the storyteller. Not all of the contributors to this well-presented volume are too bothered with the here and now, preferring the might-have-been, the possible and the muffled past. Yet even these have the integrity one must expect from Enright. Not surprisingly, but perhaps uniquely, it is her introduction to the collection which has been taking up critical reviewing space, as if it is her own voice rather than those of her writing community (it is a community, at a stretch rather like the communion of saints) that is most of interest or even of value. Well of course it is of value. Enright is a fairly downright personality, a person from whom one might anticipate home truths told with a tinge of mercy. Some of her most significant writing has not been fiction at all but essays, extended reflections on the vision of where she was. It was new motherhood when My Milk; On Becoming a Mother was published in the London Review of Books in 2002, followed by Making Babies: Stumbling Into Motherhood two years later. The lyricism of her translation of such ordinary processes is memorable, perhaps even more so than her fiction. Like the poet Eavan Boland (in Object Lessons 1995) Enright has a capacity for infused as well as informed reflection, able to see what lies beyond or, in the case of texts such as she has gathered in this book, beneath.

Sometimes of course it is more relaxing to read simply what is on the surface. We can’t always be looking for hidden meanings or relationships, decoding sentences instead of taking in what is being told rather than what is being suggested. The difference between a yarn — easily read, comprehended and remembered — and a short story constructed as a piece of literary fiction, laced with clues and hints, is a challenging gap, but in this collection Enright crosses it with a confidence born from her own reactions.

For Colm McCann’s Everything in this Country Must, for example, she admits that “I could not, in any conceivable universe, have written such a thing myself”. That says something about Enright, but it doesn’t say much about McCann except that only he could provide the long, slow, teasing shock of his story, and that only he could deliver it in that precise voice.

Equally the measured paragraph by paragraph pace and disclosures of Meles Vulgaris by Patrick Boyle — a story which the late Benedict Kiely declared could not have been written by anyone else, except Turgenev — is a reminder of a writer who could remain contemporary, as Enright suggests, while being “out of joint with his time”. It could be argued that in the middle of the 20th century in Ireland Boyle was a writer in tune with the misogynistic tendencies of his era; the temptation to argue exactly that point, and several others made by Enright, is one of the pleasures and distractions of her book.

For many readers the questions will include ‘Who is Patrick Boyle?’ (1905-1982, Antrim-born novelist and writer of three collections of short stories), but that too could be considered one of the functions of this book, the revelation of authors who themselves have been written out of the Irish literary canon. There is an absence: although some of the writers gathered here were born in the late Victorian age, their work was mostly published in the 1900s, and the chronology stretches from there to 2010. This anthology, therefore, is not definitive and there are absences of some significance. Their replacements however have a strong showing and do not disgrace Enright’s critical judgment, even if they can’t all live up to her description of the stories of John McGahern as “the literary equivalent of a hand grenade rolled across the kitchen floor”. They are often a grim contingent and few, with the possible exception of Maeve Brennan (who died in 1993) have managed to match the extraordinary fusion of humour and pathos achieved by Frank O’Connor in The Mad Lomasneys (a story, incidentally, which should be read by everyone in Cork, using as it does the city’s geography almost as lovingly as it delineates the plot).

But grim or otherwise they are robust for the most part, writing with confidence and in many cases with considerable style and often, too, with a subtlety which can be thrilling.

The list of authors is thrilling in itself, and reassuring. From Roddy Doyle to John Banville, from Eilis Ní Dhuibhne to Clare Keegan, from Bernard MacLaverty to Philip Ó Cealleagh, Colm Tóibín and Kevin Barry, this is a starry body of work with a backbone of unclosed dates, the half-empty brackets indicating the future. Although one must curb one’s enthusiasm: maybe, with only 10 of the 31 stories here written by women, of whom four are dead, Enright’s selection for Granta isn’t so reassuring after all.

Picture: Man Booker prizewinner Anne Enright has edited The Granta Book of the Irish Short Story