Madam, - Living as I do in the East of Yorkshire, I am slow to catch up on the Irish literary scene, so I hope I will be allowed to comment at this late date on Eileen Battersby's review of Eugene McCabe's collection of stories, Heaven Lies About Us (Weekend Review, January 15th).
Having just read the book, and believing it to constitute a major landmark in Irish literary history, as well as in McCabe's own writing career, I feel it would would be quite wrong if Ms Battersby's evaluation were allowed to pass unchallenged.
Ms Battersby begins by acknowledging McCabe's reticent eloquence and a reputation built on the trilogy of short stories, Cancer, Heritage and Victims, and consolidated by "the classic stature of the novel Death and Nightingales". Thus "the arrival of a new book by McCabe" is "guaranteed to generate excitement".
Alas, she suggests, we have been cheated: this is not a new novel, nor a collection of new stories, but a reprinting of stories which have all been published before. What is worse, returning to the stories "has proved problematic'" for we can now see that, however highly we thought of them in the past, they are not really narratives in the true sense but mere "bulletins, deliberate snapshots", "chronicles" of borderland woes.
So in some stories "the dialogue is clipped and raw" and fails to "convince". The Famine stories are more monologues than narratives and are overloaded with "information" and "historical detail" which renders them "surprisingly artificial". In short, although the material is of historical and cultural importance, it has not been transmuted into enduring art.
Ms Battersby concludes by invoking two time-defying élites: those writers, like J.M.Coetzee, who are as great as they are important, "artists whose stories engage as well as inspire"; and those Irish short-story writers whose names "read like a roll-call of honour" - Joyce, O'Connor, MacLaverty, Lavin, Brennan, Trevor, and McGahern, "all of whom share a feel for story". To these élites the writer under review is rigorously denied admission. "McCabe is different", Ms Battersby explains, because "he responds [ only] to facts", and because "injustice, not the need to tell stories, is his abiding motivation".
No doubt this put-down is simply a case of eccentric and aberrant judgment to which even the most sophisticated of readers is prone to from time to time. In the first place, it is surely perverse to ask for something new in a collection of stories avowedly spanning 30 years. What we have instead is an opportunity to see that, when put together, these stories add up to an extraordinary achievement: there is something monumental in the book's depth and scope as it moves from present to past, and from the terrible intimacies of family life to the furies of nationalist, colonial, and post-colonial politics.
Ms Battersby also misses the complexities which enrich McCabe's anger at cruelty and injustice, hypocrisy and self-deception. Everywhere the stories reveal a compassionate awareness that victimisers in personal and political relationships have redeeming qualities or are themselves prisoners and victims of a past and a culture they did not invent; nothing in his view of the Irish and the Anglo-Irish is simple. And far from being deficient in imaginative realisation, the stories are extraordinarily sensuous and concrete.
Ms Battersby surmises that "this volume may be intended as the first British edition to bring McCabe to a new audience. . .[ one which is] unaware of [ his] lasting cultural and historical relevance"; but she predicts gloomily that the British readers "may instead be oppressed by anger and melodrama". I must point out, however, that the signs so far suggest otherwise. A eulogistic review in the London Independent concludes by saying that "these lacerating stories, for all their bleakness, have a beauty and validity of their own, setting moments of evocation against the grim truth-telling which precedes regeneration". Even higher praise is offered by Claire Messud in the Daily Telegraph (January 22nd). She writes:
"I have never read fiction that renders with such economy and brutal force the coexisting truths of sectarian hatred and entangled cohabitation. For readers keen to experience the power of which fiction is capable, the dread and sorrow it can elicit, the linguistic excitement it can provoke and, above all, the thrill of seeing anew, and more profoundly, what one thought one knew, McCabe is indispensable. Like Chekhov or the Sicilian writer Verga, he is an artist of the common man's lot. . .
". . .His challenge [ is] to invigorate and render urgent the struggles - Protestant, Catholic, human - of those who inhabit his realm. It is a challenge to which he repeatedly rises with glorious ferocity, without a flicker of sentimentality, and with a measure of greatness."
Irish readers in danger of being persuaded that they have been tricked by the historical and cultural importance of McCabe's work, and by national pride, into thinking of him as a profound artist should attend to Claire Messud rather than Eileen Battersby. - Yours, etc.,
TOM McALINDON, Emeritus Professor of English, University of Hull, England.