Short StoriesOccasionally a description is overdone, from time to time a wisecrack is superfluous, but this is perhaps the inevitable result of generosity; you will be hard pressed to find a dull paragraph in Kevin Barry's very stylish and witty first collection of short stories.
Barry is at his very best when writing of the tedium and evasions of small-town life in an Ireland now blessed with just enough money and freedom to support a fine dose of disorientation. "I had a go off yours, you had a go off mine," a neighbour tells midlands poultry farmer John Martin, the protagonist of the hilarious Animal Needs - and they're not discussing the repercussions of trying out each other's bicycles.
Despite the abundance of clues and markers from a familiar landscape, the reader is cleverly kept off-balance in these journeys to a land that is trembling in confusion between the old and the new. Rather like the amnesiac approaching Clonmel by bus in See the Trees How Big They've Grown, who has no notion of his identity yet discovers he has a lease on a chipper and "knew his way around the inside of a deep-fat fryer". Later he stumbles into a pub and, to keyboard accompaniment, brings them to their knees with Crying, by Roy Orbison: "There was no doubt about it but he had a big future ahead of him at the pass-the-mike session in Keogh's lounge on Clancy Street on Tuesday night." The mystery of a man's life resolves itself into a small-town alcoholic routine, and the story is an inspired combination of the surreal, the sad and the comic.
Breakfast Wine, narrated by one of a pair of farmers ("site-farmers") propping up a bar, is a good tight story, pared back to a single scene:
We had no women. It was an awful lack in our lives. Mothers, daughters, lovers, wives, we had none of these at all, not a one between us, because women were at a premium in the county, and in truth we were hardly prizetakers. It was from this lack of women that we had turned into old women ourselves . . . Nothing could occur in the town of an insignificance beyond our gossip.
Excitement then comes through the door of the North Star public house, in female form: "In quietish towns there are women with a great want for drama and heat, even if it's only trouble can bring it." She is on the run, having driven all night after escaping a jealous husband who had tied her up with flex in the garage. "A marriage is an old record, she said. It'll go around and around grand for years and then it gets so scratched its unlistenable." She joins the session, becomes the third drinker, saving the establishment from going under. "So it was that the North Star was saved."
Though Barry has a special gift for the bizarre and grotesque, he can hit other notes with assurance, as in To the Hills, the plain tale of a couple of women who go hillwalking in the search for love. They are both after Brian, who is no great catch, but competition creates its own dynamic. Brian can not see this far, and settles for the woman he is less attracted to, reasoning that the imperatives of natural selection are best ignored "when you're past forty and you're masturbating into a sock the grey mornings in a one-bedroom apartment . . ."
WITH GREAT PLAYFULNESS, Barry interweaves colloquial rhythms and vocabulary with language that is lyrical or more deliberately literary. This style creates at times a certain sympathetic closeness to the world of his characters, at others a mocking distance. This alternating intimacy and sharpness sets the tone of the book, giving unity to these varied stories (and is perhaps why Nights at the Gin Palace, with its eccentric English characters, seems less convincing).
Kevin Barry has produced a collection of vibrant, original, and intelligent short stories, and a number of the tales contained in There Are Little Kingdoms deserve to be read and reread, and to outlast the strange years that made them.
Philip O Ceallaigh's short story collection, Notes from a Turkish Whorehouse, published last year by Penguin Ireland, won the Rooney Prize and the Glen Dimplex fiction award, and was shortlisted for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award
There Are Little Kingdoms By Kevin Barry The Stinging Fly Press, 177pp. €12