Sullen Craft or Art?The Blackstaff Book of Short Stories; Jane Alley by Peter Hollywood; The Birds of theInnocent Wood by Deirdre Madden; Adventures in a Bathyscope by Aidan Mathews;Changelings by Melissa Murray; Blood and Water by Eilís Ní Dhuibhne; Burning Your Own byGlenn PattersonReview by: Mary MontantThe Irish Review (1986-), No. 5 (Autumn, 1988), pp. 118-120Published by: Cork University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/29735395 .

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118 Reviews

a roving eye' who once stood 'within spitting distance' of the pale bespeaaded Pacelli, Pio Dodicesimo.

The text itself is ill-supported by John Verling's B&W illustrations, mostly smudgy nudes engaged in lewd praaices; in one case the picture is inverted.

AIDAN HIGGINS

Sullen Craft or Art?

The Blackstaff Book ofShort Stories. (No editor given.) 1988. Belfast: Blackstaff Press. ISBN

0-85640-399-7. Stg?4.95.; Peter HollywoodJa?^%. 1987. Belfast: Pretani Press. ISBN

0-948868-08-2. Stg?3.95;Deirdre Madden. The Birds of the Innocent Wood. 1988. London:

Faber and Faber. ISBN 0-571-14880-8. Stg?5.95; Aidan Mathews. Adventures in a

Bathyscope. 1988. London: Seeker and Warburg. ISBN 0-436-27418-3. Stg?l0.95; Melissa

Murray. Changelings., 1987. Dublin: Attic Press. ISBN 0-946211-42-6. IR?4.95pbk.; ?il?s Ni Dhuibhne. Blood and Water. 1988. Dublin: Attic Press. ISBN 0-946211-64-X pbk. IRG4.95; Glenn Patterson. Burning Your Own. 1988. London: Chattoand Windus. ISBN

0-7011-3291-4. Stg?ll.95.

In this otherwise varied collection of d?buts, there is one striking similarity which gave me pause for thought. All these books are very carefully 'crafted'. The standard of con

sdous authorship is high. In some way, each one of these young writers seemed to feel

bound to impress the reader with a display of skill. I began to wonder if they might all have been on similar writing courses, or in some way all have received the message that

self-consciously tricksy prose is the secret of success? Or is this the effea of concentrated

admiration for James Joyce, to whose very tricksy prose they have all doubtless been

much exposed? They display a remarkable range of technical sophistication, and I am

forced to admire the consistent effort of their work. Yet at the end of it, there wasn't one

with whom I felt really engaged. The deliberate skilfulness of the writing had the effect of

making me a fer more passive and distant reader than I am usually, and the result of this was that the content of their works, which is often serious, disturbing and important, somehow slithered by me. I was left feeling a rather guilty, 'So what?'

The best example of this problem of over-crafting would be the extreme chic of the

stories by Aidan Mathews. The stories are quite brilliant in thdr presentation and the ideas around which they are formed have just the right degree of nastiness to be

thoroughly intriguing. As a confirmed lover of the gothic, I settled down to enjoy myself with his Adventures in a Bathyscope. (By the way, shouldn't it be 'bathyscaphe'?) But

Mathews soon started to draw my attention to his writing-craft: 'Bear with me: I am just

trying to establish verisimilitude. . . ' and a couple of pages later: ' I knew my author was

not striving for verisimilitude' ('The Story of the German Parachutist Who Landed 42

Years Late'). Or again, in 'In the Dark' : 'I am not going to talk about the battery clock or

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Beviews 119

the curtains because the point has been well and truly established and you can imagine it

for yourself. After all we are in this together. ' In feet, for me, the whole effect of such lit?

tle interpolations was extremely patronizing. In this tale, Mathews had already told me

fer too often about the battery clock and the curtains: and now I was being instructed to

'imagineit' while hegot on withthemoreinterestingbits. I didn't feel at all that I was 'in

it together' with him: I felt dragooned. Later in the collection, my suspicion that he has

little respect for his reader's powers was confirmed by the outright homilies of 'The

Figure on the Cross' and 'Nagasaki'. The gothic nastiness seemed no more than skin

deep, unfortunately. I felt this was really fin de si?cle writing, all polish and technique, with a heart of chocolate fondant.

Although this effect was much less pronounced in the other books, the same problem haunted my reading of them. The two first novels, by Deirdre Madden and Glenn Pat?

terson, seemed especially nervous and overworked, though both had strong and

thoughtful themes. Patterson's novel is about childhood in Belfast around 1969, and he

has tried so hard to be accurate about the detail of twenty years ago that the narrative is

often painfully slow while he displays his research; into decimalization, for instance:

'coins. Coppers in the main, but there were a few sixpenny bits there, and a shilling or

two besides; and in the safe-keeping of the zip-pocket at the back of his jeans there were

even two, brand-spanking new ten-pence pieces'. Deirdre Madden's prose is far freer

and more relaxed, but she has chosen a mechanically clever structure which disrupts the

reader's interest in her characters at regular intervals.

A similarly interfering effect drove me quite mad as I read Peter Hollywood's stories.

He includes a tale told thus: 'Once upon a time he I used to have the impression that once inside my his grandmother's house, the outside would change

. . . ' This rapidly becomes the bureaucratic: 'In his/my time, I/he had examined many a bolt and lock . . .' and the writer never relaxes for a moment from this intensely irritating trick. In

fact, all his tales have one basic trick which is worked to death.

The stories by Melissa Murray and Eilis Dhuibhne were infinitely more enjoyable than

anything mentioned so far, and chiefly because of their robust sense of humour. In con?

trast with Aidan Mathews' sniggering irony, the tolerant hilarity of some of Eilis Ni

Dhuibhne's stories was like coming out of a toyshop into a real street. She is full of ideas

and is generous with them?not parsimoniously bulking them out with clever writing. I

loved her story, 'The Postmen's Strike' for its knock-about satire on Irish marriage and

its delight in sending Culture up rotten: 'When emotion swells up in an Irishman's

heart, To talk in rhyming couplets he feels he must start. ' At the same time, both she and

Melissa Murray have strong points to make and want to be clearly understood by their

readers. The distinction between their work and the rest would be similar to that be?

tween the floriferous egotism of AE and the political commitment of O'Casey. I think it

is no accident that both are feminists in their work. Yet even these two exciting writers seem to have been tampered with by the craftsman's guild, for Murray has uncomfor?

table times with allegory and Ni Dhuibhne tries her hand at Ulyssean headlines in an od?

dly ineffectual piece called 'The Duck-Billed Platypus'. I should like to welcome the Blackstaff Book of Short Stories warmly. It is a pleasure to

browse through works by so many young writers, and the standard is high throughout.

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120 Reviews

It would require another whole review to comment adequately on this lively and varied

colleaion. Most of the stories are realistic, even domestic, in their content, often told in the first person as anecdote or memory. I felt they were well-chosen, not just individual?

ly but as a group, and that is certainly the key to a satisfying anthology. I was grateful to

the unnamed editor(s) at Blackstaff for choosing such dassically formed stories as Bren? dan Murphy's 'Heroes' (a tale I feel sure would succeed in any fourth year class-room) as

well as more experimental ones like Eilis Ni Dhuibhne's 'Midwife to the Fairies'. It is an

assured anthology, able to contain stories as diverse in tone as Anne Sharpe's savage

'History of Pinky', which tells how a 'beloved' only son is made into a paragon and

thoroughly hated by his sisters, and the sentimental Trust' by Helen O'Carroll, about a

family with a handicapped child. I think it shows wise and confident editorship to

recognise they could be complementary.

MAKY MONTANT

A sanitised text?

Daniel J. Murphy (ed. ). Lady Gregory's Journals, Volume Two: Books Thirty to Forty-Four. Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1987. ISBN 0-900675-92-6. Stg?40.00.

This volume ofLady Gregory's journals covers the period from February 1925, when she was 73, to shortly before her death in May 1932 (not 1935 as indicated on the dustjacka) and completes publication of the diaries which she began to keep in 1916 during her first skirmishes over possession of Hugh Lane's colleaion of Impressionist paintings. When Hugh Lane went down with the Lusitania, his formal will left this colleaion to

the British National Gallery, while an unwitnessed codicil left them to the National

Gallery in Dublin. Lady Gregory, prompted by family feeling (she was Hugh's aunt), by her role as executor to Hugh's will, and by nationalistic indignation, committed herself to regaining the piaures for Ireland, an intergovernmental wrangle which went on from 1916 to long after her death. The struggle had already been going on for nine years in

1925, but the endless meetings, conversations, letters and arguments of those negotia? tions still form the strongest single strand going through the diaries. Interwoven with that story there are other public commitments: the Abbey Theatre, its board-members,

plays, playwrights and aaors; the fight to keep the Abbey free of government and clerical

interference; her support of the Carnegie Trust libraries in the face of continuing clerical

suspicion. Forming a constant background fabric, are her more private concerns for Coole Park, its house and woods, her neighbours, her grandchildren, and her complex personal and literary association with Yeats.

The diaries were written in forty-four notebooks, with many later emendations and additions. This edition is primarily based, however, on the typescript form, which

represents, according to the editor, 'all that Lady Gregory wished to preserve of the

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