Despite the subtitle, there's not a heck of a lot of love in these stories. Enduring conjugal love is the absence which beats at the heart of the book.
If Only is aimed at raising funds. All the authors who were invited to contribute stories on the theme of love and divorce have freely donated their work (although presumably not their copyright). Royalties from the book go to the Marriage and Relationship Counselling Service.
All this is good news. But it also creates obstacles for the reviewer. When the proceeds of any book, record or any other philanthropic project are intended for charitable purposes, it can seem rough to turn in a review that is in any way negative; literally uncharitable.
It's also complicated by the fact that both editors are themselves also contributors. This makes it all a bit hot-housey, especially when one acknowledges that some of the other writers are also contributors to this newspaper in some form or other.
Here are 19 women writing about love and divorce. Marital breakdown may well at times be the fault of only one party, but marriages themselves wouldn't exist if there hadn't originally been some sort of mutual agreement between man and woman. Yet the only male voice, let alone author, who features in this book is the narrator of Maeve Binchy's "Taxi-Men Are Invisible".
If nothing else, 10 men and 10 women writers would have been an interesting publicity-making angle on a book about love and divorce. It might also have widened the readership. The men of my acquaintance are not inclined to buy all-female-credited, sunshine-yellow paperbacks with pretty flowers embossed on the cover.
Surely the main aim of a fundraising book is to attract as wide a readership as possible? It seems a bit daft to edit out half the punters from the beginning. Or perhaps Poolbeg thought that buyers of a book of this title would be primarily women, whatever the sex of the writers.
The stories? On the whole, joyless portraits of marriage, whether still intact, breaking, or already broken. The composite image is bleak. "A broad and varied perspective on modern Ireland," says the editors' Foreword.
The men are philanderers ("Ripples", Patricia Scanlan; "Windfalls", Mary Rose Callaghan; "Do the Decent Thing", Ita Daly); violent ("Lucy's Story", Mary Maher); commuting to second, secret families ("Breaking", Kate Cruise O'Brien; "TaxiMen are Invisible", Maeve Binchy); or socially inoffensive but thoroughly unlikeable eejits ("Last Opening at the Last Chance Saloon", Marian Keyes; "Bishop's House", Mary Gordon).
And what, one wonders, did the editors make of "The Orphan", Mary Dorcey's grim tale of child abuse? It's so far from the supposed brief that it could be set on Bondi Beach in Australia. Perhaps that's an understandable difficulty in asking for contributions towards such projects: to a certain extent, you have to take what you get.
But what you also get is Margaret Donlan's "A Girl Like You", a lovely, wicked black comedy of possession; Jennifer Johnston playing deftly with words in "Son, Moon and Stars"; Mary Leland's atmospheric "Commencements", in which there's a wonderfully precise description of a child's taffeta hair-ribbons "which shrieked when being tied"; Ellie in Sheila Barrett's "Ellie's Ring", who is a beguilingly memorable character; Katy Hayes's hilarious description of a young boy's sexual experiments, which result in "a noise like the sea flapping onto the beach".
Perhaps the most interesting explorations of "love and divorce" are the stories which are unspecific as to why relationships collapsed or partners vanished ("Clods", Mary Morrissy; "Passover", Mary O'Donnell; "Commencements", Mary Leland). There is a silence at the centre of these stories which comes across as honest and credible.
It's a truism, but not all broken relationships can be explained; nor does everyone necessarily wish to reveal why things did not turn out the way they hoped. And the endings are more often in whimpers than the gloriously destructive banging of Kate Cruise O'Brien's "Breaking".
Contemplating their wedding rings, the estranged wife in "Clods" has "imagined some grand gesture, the pair of them standing on a bridge and flinging the gold tokens high into the air". The reality? Pragmatically, her ex-husband simply stops wearing his ring.
Rosita Boland is a fiction writer and critic
