Book review: Stories that are always alive to the overwhelming weight of our pasts

Old age, waning minds, distortions of perception, and capitalism’s assault on nature are at the heart of Shane Tivenan’s alternately blunt and poetic collection

Shane Tivenan ‘has a strong grasp of the inner workings of human emotion, and never shirks its darker corners.’

• To Avenge a Dead Glacier 
• Shane Tivenan 
• Lilliput Press,€15.95

In the title short story of Shane Tivenan’s debut collection, an Icelandic priest gives an angry eulogy for a fallen glacier.

“We lack the word,” he says, “for ocean currents that forget how to flow. Forget how to do their job. Like they have caught the memory disease from the old people who swim in their waters.”

Old age, waning minds, distortions of perception, and capitalism’s assault on nature are at the heart of Tivenan’s alternately blunt and poetic collection, which tells the stories of rural outsiders, loners, and outcasts unable or unwilling to submit to the order imposed by small-town Irish life.

'To Avenge a Glacier' is the longest story in the collection, but not the best, its narrative a little too diffuse. 

Much more powerful are the shorter, terser tales such as 'Whoever She Is is Beyond Me', a beautifully-judged exploration of the inner life of Agnes, an elderly woman struggling with dementia, a condition she refuses to acknowledge and rebels against. 

“I can tell heath from heather,” she insists. “I can boil an egg to goo without a timer.”

There are biblical echoes in 'Dino Matcha', when a didactic graffiti artist has his feet washed by a young man who has every right to hate him.

In 'Mother Vs Deep Blue', a chess-mad mother and son identify the tipping point that would eventually trigger the runaway epidemic of AI — in 1996, when the legendary champion Garry Kasparov played a giant IBM computer called Deep Blue. 

Everyone thought the Russian would easily prevail, but then the machine began to behave in unexpected fashion. 

“Deep Blue did not do what a computer was supposed to do. It thought hard… it played a human move.”

Twenty years later, in the National Museum of American History, the mother unplugs Deep Blue in an act of geriatric spite.

In the most touching story of all, 'Honey Brown', the title character experiences vivid hallucinations caused by Bonnet syndrome as she prepares to celebrate her 92nd birthday in a residential home. 

Luckily for her, a fellow resident called Dot is ever at hand to help, and the pair chatter back and forth like the Vladimir and Estragon of midlands care homes. 

“Well,” Honey says, “it’s about my — you know Dot, the little things I do be seeing. Say no more Honey.”

In 'Patterns', a neurodivergent 12-year-old boy called Martin is unsettled by his grandfather’s death, and on a trip to Spain becomes obsessed by the soundscapes small birds and insects create. 

His father is understandably protective of the child, and recalls a regrettable incident at a supermarket. 

“I’d gone in over the checkout at a lad in Lidl a few weeks back. Martin had challenged him on the price of spuds and said they were cheaper during the Famine…”

'Patterns' is a funny story, tender but full of fear.

In 'Shandeeka', a love of music in general and sean-nós in particular pulls a family asunder, and in 'Did You Ever Hear of Alfonso, the Young King of Spain?', a young woman travels to southern Europe to attend the funeral of her father, whom she has never forgiven for concealing his homosexuality.

'Resurrection of a Corncrake' explores the festering guilt of an elderly Roscommon plasterer who feels complicit in the disappearance of the once common bird, and in the final story, 'Endsong', the crakes themselves have their say, turning the air blue with their salty invective.

Shane Tivenan is a fine writer, and there are passages here that achieve a rough lyricism. He has a strong grasp of the inner workings of human emotion, and never shirks its darker corners. 

And his stories are alive always to the overwhelming weight of our pasts, which must somehow be accommodated.

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