Book review: Memory and Desire
THIS new collection is a selection of insightful short stories from Val Mulkerns that span several decades, starting with the tale of an idealistic and stubborn rebel prisoner in 1916 and ending in the 1980s with the title story about a man who is disarmed by a TV crew that is making a documentary on his successful exporting glassmaking business.
In Memory and Desire, Bernard is perceived by people whose acceptance he would like, as being “arrogant, unfriendly and not plain enough to be encouraged as an oddity”.
He is drawn to the television crew whose director is the conduit for dragging up memories of Bernard’s deceased brother.
Bernard may have “the brazen confidence you only get from too much money”, as one of the crew remarks, but there are hidden depths to this lonely man.
There’s a self-hater in End of The Line. The narrator, Anna, likes to visit the rented home of her genteel elderly piano teacher, Mr Bentley, her only real friend.
“His eyes were kind and blue as cornflowers,” she observes.
Stuck in a miserable marriage, Anna comes to Mr Bentley’s house “to forget the person I really was”.
The idyll of this refuge is shattered but memories have been created through harvesting raspberries in Mr Bentley’s garden.
Home is important in The Open House. Teresa covets a large house that’s for sale. It’s a very bohemian house with a constant stream of minor arty celebrities that impress Teresa who reads about them in newspaper social columns.
While her husband is initially resistant to buying the house, Teresa has her heart set on it.
“Her four sisters each had a bright box in the suburbs of Dublin and she dreamed of dazzling them with something different.”
However, it’s a case of be careful of what you wish for.
One of the main characters in the story, You Must be Joking, has what she wished for, but nothing is ever enough. The manipulative Mona, married to the pretentious Morgan Judge, has a successful career as a novelist — but not very fine novels, it is implied.
She is a publicity seeker, signing autographs for “for all those depraved stockbrokers and libidinous elderly civil servants”.
She puts herself in a potentially compromising situation with a journalist — with the full approval of her husband. It’s all about column inches.
It’s all about the Pope in Humane Vitae and how he dictates the sex life of a couple. Not that the husband gives a toss about the Vatican and its rules on family planning.
Out in the wild terrain of the west of Ireland, Michael, who hasn’t seen his holidaying wife for a while as he’s away working, becomes amorous but she (referred to as ‘the wife’) puts a stop to this because of the particular stage of her menstrual cycle. It’s a bone of contention between them. And as far as Michael is concerned, the story doesn’t end well.
Summer in London, written a few decades ago, is about three young students who are in London to terminate their unwanted pregnancies.
Amusingly, the story opens with the trio gathered to repeat the “orgy in Harrods” that Eleanor had enjoyed with her mother.
We’re talking a cake-eating orgy which could be a metaphor for passionate unprotected sex. But in the end, only the rather grim Una is resolute about an abortion.
“A few pregnant bishops would alter everything in a remarkably short time. Roll on the ordination of women.”
The stories of Mulkerns have not dated one bit.
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