Book review: Beautifully crafted, relatable stories that bring our capital city to life

Many of Dave Tynan's characters are bruised by stagnation: struggling in poorly-paid jobs, torpedoed by the housing crisis, and unmoored from their peers who are reaching the milestones of adulthood

Dave Tynan’s cinematic eye is not surprising, given his history with directing. Picture: Stephen Gallagher

• We Used to Dance Here 
• Dave Tynan 
• Granta Books, €16.99 

This short story collection fizzes with friction, flair, and fury. Revolving mainly around millennial characters, Dave Tynan’s first book, We Used to Dance Here, is a collection of 10 short stories set between 2016 and 2020 in his native Dublin.

The crisp prose brims with immediate, revealing imagery.

A joiner notices that, when concentrating, his colleague’s tongue is “poking out like a little fish”.

Two friends drink “diesel-strong coffee while the sun buttered up Kate’s kitchen”.

That Tynan conjures these observations with a cinematic eye isn’t surprising: he has directed short films and the feature-length Dublin Oldschool (2018).

The latter focused on estranged brothers, Jason, an aspiring DJ, and Daniel, a homeless heroin addict, when they meet by chance and wander through the capital during a lost weekend.

Those themes of frustrated ambition and marginalisation dominate much of the book.

Tynan portrays Dublin as a ruthless, chameleon-like, disorienting city.

Many of his characters are bruised by stagnation: struggling in poorly-paid jobs, torpedoed by the housing crisis, and unmoored from their peers who are reaching the milestones of adulthood.

Róisín, the protagonist in Baby’s First Plague, embodies all these strains.

She imagines herself in a draughty community hall, surrounded by similarly broken, embarrassed kin, standing up, and saying: “My name is Róisín and I am a resentaholic.”

The stories often centre on characters as they undergo a significant turning point in their lives: a relationship breakup, a devastating injury, a fledgling love affair.

“They never checked their phones,” Tynan writes of a couple on a date. “They never thought to.” We Used to Dance Here is freckled by displacement and emigration.

In Forge Worlds, Oran, lives in an (unnamed) county he hates outside his native Dublin because it’s where he could afford to buy, a place “everyone in the town called Howiya Estate, because half of them were Dubs forced down here”.

But the book also complicates the narrative that leaving invariably offers sanctuary. “She wasn’t living in London,” Tynan writes of a character. “She was surviving in it.”

Despite its preoccupations, the collection is leavened by heavy dashes of humour, especially Tynan’s finesse at skewering relatable contemporary exasperations.

In Crispy Bits, Hannah, embarking on a relationship with Aaron, agonises about the etiquette demanded (“play the right games, dodge the wrong ones, check in enough but not too much”).

Meanwhile, a character in her thirties is as exhausted by the “wedding industrial complex” of recurring nuptials as she is fearful of the “Ryanair bag gestapo”.

A thread glinting through the book’s comedy is its marked Irish sensibility.

Supermac’s is only “for boggers and train stations and boggers in train stations”.

Likewise, the dialogue often unfolds in a distinctly Hiberno-English timbre, for example: “Herself wants a fitted kitchen.”

For his debut, Tynan confidently experiments with form.

In How Do You Know Them?, maybe the collection’s finest-crafted story, two London-based Irish characters meet at a wedding at home.

The momentum suggests they’ll get together, but this expectation is subverted: their brief interaction is stifled by inhibition, and they don’t see each other again — despite visiting the same shops in London.

In an essay in Ship in Full Sail, Colm Tóibín writes that, unlike a novel, a short story requires a “single poetic or ironic moment”.

We Used to Dance Here is laced with such occurrences.

Arguably, the most incisive is In The Slaugh.

Paddy is having a “wake for the gaff” from where he is about to be evicted.

But in his house is a faded poster from the start of the pandemic emblazoned with words that, given his situation, drip with gluttonous irony: ‘Stay Home’.