There is a line in the song Hearts and Bones by Paul Simon, where his wife — Carrie Fisher — tries to entice him on an all-night drive to Mexico, to which he sings, “Why won’t you love me/For who I am/Where I am.” It neatly captures the dislocation at the centre of Niamh Mulvey’s debut, where characters often find themselves out of sync with their circumstances and each other. Described as “love songs” rather than short stories, they are played on the offbeat and lean towards dissonance rather than close harmony.
The book opens with Mother’s Day, in which a woman meets her mother at an art gallery, where a few needling exchanges tell you all you need to know about their relationship. It’s the sort of mother-daughter tango that plays out in My Phantoms by Gwendoline Riley or Bolt from the Blue by Jeremy Cooper — the adult-child dynamic inverts once the mother needs more looking after, but the old power balance remains. Just when the story feels like it’s heading in a familiar direction, it veers into something more interesting. It concludes with a subtle revelatory moment that redefines what went before it.
The theme of motherhood also features in Childcare, told from the point of view of the 10-year-old daughter of an attention-seeking, though not attention-giving, mother. The girl is a literal and figurative outsider: either locked out of the house while her mother sleeps, or excluded from the version of her mother that others see and celebrate. Again, this is a story that plays on the distance between characters rather than their connection. The mother is neither who or where her daughter needs her to be.
Good For You, Cecilia and Blackbirds explore the role of shifting status in sibling relationships. In the latter, a loving brother is outshone by his gifted younger sister, and their lives and fortunes diverge from there. It’s a story that aces one of the trickiest things in short fiction: conveying the passage of time. Mulvey achieves this by using a brisk style and seasoning the prose with only the details that matter — the brother is described in adulthood as an “as-far-as-we-know celibate uncle”, a phrase that does the work of several pages of backstory.
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When the brother and sister reconnect later in life, we get a sense of something complex and unnamed, though palpable, between them. To some extent, being good at short stories means being good at endings. While there is a place for the ambiguous, the unresolved, this felt like a story where something more definite was available and needed. By contrast, First Time — a clever story about a young couple’s first experience of sex (and burglary) — ends with a satisfying “click”, making it feel nice and sturdy.
The title story Hearts & Bones is in more conventional Irish short story territory. A teenage girl, part of a religious movement, becomes pregnant against the backdrop of abortion debates in Ireland. Redemption in the eyes of her religious role model comes not from forgiveness, but by adapting the narrative around her pregnancy to one of Christian suffering. Though interesting, it feels less distinct than some of the other stories in the collection, as though it were written earlier, when the writer was still individuating.
The star of the collection is The Doll, a strange and original story about a fragile young man who uses a ventriloquist dummy to articulate his self-loathing. The “doll” becomes an unhealthy obsession for him. Though inanimate, its role in the story’s later drama makes it a sinister presence, representing whatever unspoken darkness the reader’s imagination can conjure. The Doll is a minor epic that showcases Mulvey’s strengths as a writer: the strangeness, the originality, the perfect pacing and the way in which each development casts new light back on what preceded it.
As a collection, Hearts & Bones is highly accomplished. Mulvey — an editor by background — has a refined understanding of what makes a short story work. But for all her technical virtuosity, what stands out is her command of her own originality. She takes risks and makes odd choices that work when you see them on the page; her stories are inventive in their premise, without being contrived; she understands how to examine flawed characters without undermining them in the eyes of the reader. Though a debut writer, Mulvey is coming in at a high level with a book that delivers much and promises more.
