'There was an echo after the children and the children's children went home." Sandra, the grandmother from east Belfast in Dinosaur Act, describes how she feels following her husband's funeral. It is a line that shows the author Jan Carson's skill at vividly summarising both an individual's plight and a wider universal suffering. The loss of Sandra's husband is mirrored by a loss of faith. Any hope for the future comes from her grandchildren, her connection back to herself.
Carson's debut collection, Children's Children, offers 15 sharply written and inventive stories that focus on the family and its role in society. For realist stories such as Sandra's, east Belfast is a convincing backdrop. After her husband's death, Sandra is hounded by the local minister: "People expected a minister to know the Word by heart and deliver it like a politician."
In Swept, Bill is struggling to adjust to life as a retiree. He takes petty, comic revenge on his wife June by littering their garden with Twix wrappers: "In the East it didn't serve to try too hard at anything, even when it came to keeping your front step clean."
The collection’s titular story takes a surreal look at social divides. An island faces extinction unless people north and south break ranks to procreate. The author perches her characters on the brink of something momentous, wondering if it’s possible to be neither north nor south, foreign nor familiar.
Carson is based in Belfast, where she works as a community arts development officer. Her first novel, Malcolm Orange Disappears, was published to acclaim in June 2014. Her short stories, including Honest Ulsterman, Storm Cellar, Incubator and Gone Lawn, have appeared in journals on both sides of the Atlantic.
Her stories move effortlessly from reality to dystopia to surreal vignettes in a style that recalls the up-and-coming American authors Laura van den Berg and Diane Cook.
Scarily believable dystopia
The opening story, Larger Ladies, creates a scarily believable dystopia where rich husbands check their fat Ulster wives into hospital for a weight-loss programme that knocks them unconscious for months. The story is narrated by the Eastern European nurse Sonja, a single mother who worries she is traumatising her son by making him sleep in the room with the women while she works the night shift: "They seemed to float on their beds like luminous squid, or jellyfish suspended in a tank."
It is a clever drawing of a society that wants things it isn’t willing to work for, “the equivalent of six months’ hard slog at the gym”. The repercussions? Back pain, migraines, psychological problems and “the slight possibility of death”.
As flagged by the title, children feature prominently throughout, from the child’s perspective of a cheating father, to a human statue on the High Street who’d “prefer to be made of concrete” than accept the impending responsibilities of fatherhood, to the heartfelt story of adult daughter Den, financially and emotionally fraught as she cares for her dementia-riddled mother: “She feels as if there is a hole at the bottom of her throat and all the eagerness is leaving her in drips.”
The collection turns macabre in other stories containing children such as In Feet and Gradual Inches, the Gothic tale of a dead twin. In Floater, random sex in a plane toilet results in unwanted pregnancy and a curious twist on the ties that bind mothers to their children. We've Got Each Other and That's a Lot, recently published on the Irish Times Books website, is another grisly story of a swindler Belfast couple who use their children as bait to con desperate would-be parents out of thousands.
Darker still are the quirky vignettes on how to dispose of unwanted children, a missing mother who leaves her kids to fend for themselves, and a couple haunted by their dead child, Freddie, whose mother still orders for him at restaurants years later.
The grim topics are bolstered with lighter episodes such as a "sinless love affair" in Shopping, where messing with each other's trolley contents and sharing a meal in the Tesco canteen seems far more sordid than plain old adultery: "We never forgot, even for one heady second, that the shopping came first."
Observations on society are equally wry, from “gun-faced commuters” to a busy-body neighbour with “the look of a wedding priest about him, far too anxious to please”.
The children of the title are what remain in the memory, particularly the ones who are absent, such as the stillborn baby in How They Were Sitting When Their Wings Fell Off.
Children's Children is in essence a collection that explores how people deal with and recover from grief. Or as the epigraph from the Sufjan Stevens song Casimir Pulaski Day puts it: "On the floor at the great divide with my shirt tucked in and my shoes untied."
