Book review: Toxic potential of memory

Dermot Bolger casts his kindly eye over our island in search of festering regrets in 'Imperfect Beings'.

• Imperfect Beings
• by Dermot Bolger
• New Island, €15.95

Dermot Bolger has long been an astute analyst of what Colm Tóibín calls ‘Dublin’s suburban underbelly’, but in this new collection of stories casts his net a little wider, his kindly eye roving our island in search of festering regrets.

If his book has a unifying theme it’s the toxic potential of memory, which can bubble up at any time to overwhelm the flimsy present. And the older you get, the heavier the past’s burdens become.

In the opening story, Stopping at Trooperstown, a middle-aged man and woman stall their car outside a former B&B where they once experienced a magical night.

Andrew is happy that Julie remembers making love out here in the middle of nowhere during a thunderstorm, but is also amazed. 

Because after a serious brain injury inflicted by a car crash, Julie’s whole sense of reality has shifted: she does not, for instance, recall that she left Andrew for a younger man, and is convinced they are still married. With mixed feelings, he plays along.

In two stories, Half-Sister and O Professor, grown children set out to resolve messes left behind by their parents. 

When a mild-mannered Galway businessman travels to Scotland to track down the woman he believes is his long lost half-sister, he instead is confronted with a strange case of stalking and obsession involving his mercurial late father. 

And in O Professor, a grown son trails an elderly academic to his home on a Portuguese island to avenge the posting of nude images of his dead mother. Again, the reality is not so simple.

In The Nine-Iron, a widower driven mad by grief beans an obnoxious fellow golfer on the par four ninth. 

And golf recurs in The Lady Captain, as Eileen, a respected club elder, finds her progress around the course impeded by a terrible accident that killed a young man and changed her life forever.

All of these protagonists are plagued in some way or other by regret, haunted by people and events everyone else has long forgotten. 

And if they aren’t wasting precious time regretting what they did, they’re obsessing over what they didn’t do.

Jerome, a salesman who stops for petrol in Service Station Plaza, is astonished to find his old girlfriend, Carole, sitting at a table. 

She had mental health issues, and he has always regretted their break-up, but new revelations will set him straight. 

When he asks Carole if she wants more coffee, she tells him pointedly that ‘nothing is ever as nice the second time’.

In An Unknown Woman’s Name, a former statesman slowly succumbing to dementia wonders why he did not stoop to kiss a beautiful young woman in a bedsit 50 years before. 

Despite an action-packed life, this non-event haunts him, and he wonders if it might be the last thing he ever recalls.

And in the best story, A Keeper, former lighthouse man Séamus is reminded by a kissing couple of a shameful incident in his youth for which he has never forgiven himself.

Peppered through these tales are telling period details: ‘a slurp of Harp’, ‘sucking on Players No 6’, the evocative power of a miraculous medal. 

And Dermot Bolger writes best when he writes sparely, at times delivering blunt life lessons, unvarnished home truths. 

“Money has its smell,” Carole tells Jerome in Service Station Plaza. “Poverty likewise.” “Do we ever know our parents?” Hannah wonders aloud in Half-Sister. 

And in A Keeper, Séamus bitterly recalls “the casual cruelty of great beauty at play”.

And always, doubts are raised by the hopeless subjectivity of our recall. In The Lady Captain, Eileen wonders if her boring but dependable husband George “also brought secrets to the grave; because even dull men must have hidden depths and desires”.

And the ailing politician in An Unknown Woman’s Name worries constantly if his memories can be trusted. Then again, can anyone’s?