Book review: Stories that are funny and sad at same time

Bridget O'Connor's 'After a Dance: Selected Stories' is a collection to be savoured, two or three stories at a time

Bridget O'Connor was born in Harrow in northwest London, where there is a thriving Irish community, her father Jim was from Cork and her mother Bridie from Limerick.

• After a Dance: Selected Stories 
• Bridget O’Connor 
• Picador, £13.99 

After a Dance is a selection from the two volumes of short stories published by London-Irish writer Bridget O’Connor, who died of cancer in 2010, aged 49. 

Born in Harrow in northwest London, where there is a thriving Irish community, her father Jim was from Cork and her mother Bridie from Limerick.

She began her career as a writer in 1991 when her brilliant story, ‘Harp’, won the Time Out Short Story Competition. 

She also wrote plays — The Flags has been compared to the work of fellow London-Irish writer, Martin McDonagh — and she collaborated on film scripts with her husband Peter Straughan, winning a posthumous Bafta and an Oscar nomination for their adaptation of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

It is an impressive resume, yet I had never heard of O’Connor, even though I have both published and taught short stories (as the Frank O’Connor Fellow at UCC and the Munster Literature Centre). 

With the boom in short story writing in Ireland since 1998, London-based Bridget O’Connor somehow slipped under the radar.

If you use ‘weird’ and ‘quirky’ as terms of praise, then her work will definitely appeal. It manages to be both funny and heart-breakingly sad at the same time. As Roddy Doyle puts it in a generous blurb: “Some of the wildest, most arresting, just plain brilliant short stories I’ve read in a long time.”

The title story has all the ingredients of a William Trevor story, but a William Trevor story gone terribly wrong. 

Its bleak refrain — “She would recall that night often” — punctuates an account of a young girl on holiday being picked up by a boy at a dance. 

He drives her in his father’s car through narrow rural roads to his Uncle’s remote, ramshackle house, which he has a key to. 

He takes her to the damp, dusty bedroom of his recently deceased maiden aunts, and has his way with her — “The bed creaked. It seemed to her, it creaked out of time with their movements. It was not like the promise of it in the dance hall or in the car …” 

Then he falls asleep on top of her, the light still on, leaving her, to her surprise, in tears.

After a cold and sleepless night, the Uncle serves them a fry-up in the kitchen, while the young man teases the dog. It ends, “The Uncle asked was she enjoying her holiday and she said that she was.”

This is the only story set in Ireland and perhaps the least typical.

‘Heavy Petting’ is a fast-moving account of a chaotic household, told by the studious younger daughter, trying to pass her A-levels while her older sister takes up clubbing and her mother collects ill-fated pets: “Bunny and Clyde. Sid and Nancy. Mungo …. But it’s Godfrey who haunts me.”

Godfrey the goldfish survives, against all the odds, until the very last page, while the narrator fails her A-levels and starts writing a novel, the mother has a nervous breakdown and will only talk to her pet mouse, the sister succumbs to drugs, the father has an affair, and numerous small pets meet colourful deaths — including Godfrey, up to now the great survivor, who swallows an anti-depressant pill, sinks to the bottom of his tank and lies there, “slowly burbling, like a miniature ginger whale”.

O’Connor excels at the first-person monologue, as you would expect from a dramatist. 

While she seems to write in male voices as convincingly as female ones, somehow the women’s stories are generally much funnier. 

This is a collection to be savoured, two or three stories at a time. I hope it will be followed by another.

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