Stephen Walsh’s debut collection of short stories slips readers into the lives of mostly middle-aged, mostly middle-class, mostly urban Irish people. If you try to summarise, not much happens: a woman on a miserable family holiday in Spain imagines escape, a boy taken by his unhappily divorced mother to say goodbye to his dying grandfather imagines a different life, a retired history teacher imagines helping a teenager he meets in a cafe. A man walks his dog and doesn’t have an affair with a woman who walks hers. The most dramatic moment is when three men remember a plane crash averted without serious injury. In the title story, a man and his son eventually manage to buy a Christmas tree.
They’re all great, beautiful little studies of unspoken fear and longing and love, told with a sure-footed delicacy rare in a debut. Walsh is playful and often funny. He’s fascinated by the weird poetics of instructions; in Wonderhouse (Some Assembly Required), written entirely in the imperative, someone (“Part Y, you”) tries to construct a flatpack “wonderhouse” for “D”, “daughter or similar loved one, (not pictured)”. Y has not allowed enough time. He is alone (“NOTE: it is to assemble alone unsafe.”) His list of “tools also present and necessary” includes “1 Galway Hooker IPA 50cl 4.8%” to which, as the hours go on, he adds “Smirnoff, orange juice and ice”. “Bear mild to medium resentment towards breezy nature in which step is described, belying feat of human endeavour within. Simply place Space Shuttle into Earth’s Atmosphere as shown, taking care to align with landing site. Do not explode.” It’s the calibration of “mild to medium” that makes this so good. Y could be, and isn’t, simply a man amusingly losing his temper with flatpack instructions. The story is about an act of love, a doomed but faithful attempt to redeem or at least revisit a broken relationship. “Could call helpline. Reach out to page 28 on floor in O positive pool. But aware now that warranty is voided. Helpline closed. Text unread.”
Automated communication
Please Say Why You’re Calling is also about instructions and automated communication. In the early days of the internet, a German woman who perhaps verges on stereotype is sent to Dublin to introduce an “interactive voice response” system for a telecommunications company. The story is sinister and funny. “It is not a question of the IVR expanding to understand more of people’s queries, she explained in the conference room in Dublin… It is about people learning to ask the right questions… As long as your question matches our database, we will be able to help you without involving another person. If it’s something else, there will be a very long wait and possibly no answer.” There is, of course, Irish resistance, first to the automated voice’s English accent: “Your one from Fermoy…She’s not going to want to hear some disembodied hockey-stick from the home counties telling her what to so.” There’s a secret code to get through to a person: “It was the kind of thing Irish people would all tell each other. Feck the process lads, there’s a shortcut.” The company is defeated, Maria moved to a project generating anxiety about the Y2K bug, but 15 years later she comes back and she still can’t cope with people who value human contact over efficiency.
Some of these stories are exactly set in time and place, particular years and months in particular Irish towns, and in some ways they are about national and regional identities and the experiences of moments in Irish social history. There’s flight FR118 Dublin to Gatwick Dep 0740 Arr 0910, Feb 6, 2017. “This isn’t the banter bus. This is the coffin ship… We are on our way to work.” The specificity feels like sharpness of form rather than provincialism of content, high-wire, high-stakes writing despite the gentle pace of events. Walsh’s voices are small but strong, his triumphs and tragedies no less haunting for their intimate scale.
Sarah Moss’s latest novel is Summerwater. Her next, The Fell, is out this autumn
