It’s been 12 years since Philip Ó Ceallaigh published a collection of short stories, having won the Rooney Prize in 2006 for his debut, Notes from a Turkish Whorehouse, followed up, in 2009, with The Pleasant Light of Day.
A different writer, perhaps a less self-assured one, might have produced a novel at this juncture. But Ó Ceallaigh persists with the short form, and his latest collection, Trouble, is testament to why. Short stories speak differently than novels. They can accommodate more craziness, sustain things that longer, more establishment form won’t tolerate. The tormented peculiarity, the dark humour and saturation of Ó Ceallaigh’s work could not be captured any other way.
So, what to make of Trouble?
In the opening, titular story, one of the characters reflects on Tolstoy’s short story, The Death of Ivan Ilyich. “Ivan Ilyich’s death was not terrible in itself,” he ponders. “What was terrible about Ivan Ilyich’s death was that everyone around him carried on with their games and pretended that his death was not really happening.” The observation might apply to readers of this collection, sitting in our armchairs, acting as if everything is normal in the remorseless world we are presented with.
And, let me tell you, these characters are despicable. They kill people casually and then act like “the general feeling was that I had done something that needed to be done a long time ago”. They punch their sons and then watch “horrified […]and at the same time repelled, and even suspect that […]this is what he wants – to fall so that I will pick him up”. These are not nice headspaces to inhabit. A story with the honeyed title First Love is a semi-fictionalised rewriting of the diary of Nazi “Judengeneral” Felix (1910-1983).
Still, we read on. Women don’t get a favourable treatment. They are shadow figures: receptacles, domesticators, inconvenient ex-wives, humourless killjoys. Ah, but what about the daughters? I hear you ask. Yes, they are precious, loved. “You love a woman the way a bee loves a flower. It lasts as long as it needs to last. The flame is hot and brief and afterwards the cold negotiations begin. But the way you love your kid only grows and grows.”
These narrators, all men, are tender towards their female offspring. But isn’t there something perverse in that, too? That they are capable of gentleness, but more often choose the opposite.
The characters seem to contain humanity, resilience, humour, even love, but perhaps not the capacity to be good. Which might be true of all humans
The relentless brutality of Ó Ceallaigh’s work is a bit like bait for a critic. How are women supposed to read this book? Do we lie down and take it? Do we throw it across the room? Do we pick at its moral ineptitudes? Then again, how are men supposed to read it – man, the violent alpha at the heart of this world of trouble? Moralising is futile. The brutality won’t be turned on its head, nor used as currency in some righteous reckoning. The book looks on, as if amused by the shades of human character.
And if this is life at its most base, it is also life at its most natural. There’s a mixture of sordid depravity – the “f**k-monkeys” in the dream-like story Island are uncomfortably violent – and pastoral beauty: In the deftly worked Smoke, a man finds himself in a ditch, “the water trickling by my feet”, and when he looks up sees, in a Wildean moment, “the trembling stars”. The characters seem to contain humanity, resilience, humour, even love, but perhaps not the capacity to be good. Which might be true of all humans.
“I was like one of those heroes sent to the underworld in order to return to tell the story, except I had got lost down there,” a night worker tells us, early on. The whole book feels a bit lost in the underworld. Narratives keep slipping out from beneath us. “She’s not going to take my kid,” a character tells the “Elvis” he meets in Graceland. “She might as well try and kill me.” And Elvis of all people delivers the news. “Sir, you’re already dead.”
All of this adds up to a feeling of bewilderment, and yet it’s a nice bewilderment. There are so many unexpected turns and bizarre idiosyncrasies to these stories that each could do with a review, or psychoanalysis, of its own. But it’s hard not to be impressed. The lyricism and cynicism bring a strange sort of wisdom.
“How can you think about the markets, sitting in this stink?” asks a father of his son, adding, with Voltairian flourish: “Sweep the floor! Take care of the little things. That’s how we live. A little at a time.”
