Book review: ‘One of the best writers of short stories’

The stories in Lucy Caldwell's third collection, 'Openings', are thoughtful, compassionate, and often spiked with dry humour

Lucy Caldwell has written four novels and three collections of short stories.

• Openings 
• Lucy Caldwell 
• Faber, €16.99 

Lucy Caldwell’s third collection of stories confirms her reputation as one of the best writers in the genre.

They are thoughtful, compassionate, and often spiked with dry humour. Born in Belfast in 1981, the author of four novels, and recipient of the Rooney Award, in 2021 she won the BBC National Short Story Award.

Openings is largely about life before and after having children.

‘Cuddies’ is one of several stories with female narrators and about couples in their 30s who have gone from the time when life was all about them, to a plateau, that mid-point of life where you’re juggling children, careers, and spouse, while wondering, “Is this it?”.

Another recurring dilemma is the need to decide whether to live in London or Belfast. 

‘Something’s Coming’ is an entertaining ghost story featuring a wealthy couple, she Irish, he Jewish, who are spending their precious fortnight’s holiday getting lost driving around the back lanes of rainy Donegal with two children who get car sick. 

It is their mother’s fault: “I wanted them to feel, at least a tiny bit, Irish. Sometimes I thought I couldn’t bear that they were growing up with posh little London accents…[and] considered London Fields the countryside.”

Caldwell often uses Northern Irish expressions that add greatly to the atmosphere: Drookit, wee, guldered, scundered, a scroag of pubic hair. 

There’s a real sense of today’s Belfast in ‘Lay Me Down’, an account of a boozy Christmas party hosted by a couple, Jason and Aisha, who had recently swapped East London for East Belfast, buying a vast old house for less than the price of their two-bed London flat. The couples are happy, loving, but so much remains unsaid.

Another ghost story, ‘Daylight Raids’, is set in London during the blitz and is also a love story. Its mood and its setting — Regent’s Park — recall Elizabeth Bowen. 

The author argues for her protagonists’ reality, even though they are fictional: “Maybe all loves, all lives, are haunted by what they’ve never quite been or managed to become.”

The title story, ‘Openings’, is told in the second person, and has a great beginning: “The night before, you sliced your finger open halving a pomegranate.” 

The narrator is negotiating the first days of separation from her husband with three small children at home on a “drookit” day. 

They opt for soft play at Kidz Go Crazy!, “a sort of hell on an industrial estate a short bus ride away”.

The drabness and loneliness of her life are vividly conveyed, as everything that could go wrong, does. 

Later, she scrolls through posts about her friends’ more glamorous lives on social media, praying for help to get through.

‘Bibi’ is a well-judged change of register, as 30-year-old Bibi gets to know her widowed boyfriend’s three young daughters, aged from six to 16, on a holiday in Marrakesh. 

Her alcoholic mother, who phones daily, nicknamed him Captain von Trapp. If Bibi stays with him, it will mean having no children of her own, “no babies”, but she seems to realise it is the right choice to make.

‘Fiction’ is the simplest and the most touching story in this excellent collection. 

Told again in the second person — “You applied for the festival’s bursary, but didn’t win” — by a serious young student whose hard-up mother had insisted on paying for the writing workshop anyway. 

The course is run by a pompous, self-obsessed writer, who fails to discuss her work.

But over a drink after the last session, he suggests meeting for dinner to do so. You can guess what happens next. 

It is heart-breaking, as is the last line: “Did I tell you this story is true?”

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