Aingeala Flannery’s debut collection of linked stories takes place in the seaside town of Tramore, Co Waterford (population: 6,101). “The people in this book are not real but the town of Tramore is,” Flannery writes in the acknowledgments. “It took up residence in my imagination when I was a child and has refused to leave.”
The book was inspired by William Trevor’s story Honeymoon in Tramore, where postwar Tramore is described as “lovely, with a sandy little beach”. The town has since lost its lustre: in The Amusements a guide book calls it “unloved and litter-strewn”, “with little to recommend itself”. Nonetheless, “people always come back”, Flannery writes. “They build sandcastles on the beach with their kids and take them for a go on the amusements. They stand in mile-long queues for chips and 99s, anything to relive the best bits of their own childhoods.”
Shifting between first and close third person narration to render the inner lives of her characters, Flannery deftly paints the details of place. You can almost smell the popcorn and candyfloss of the promenade in Tramore, and the stale beer of a dive bar in Manhattan, where patrons “ordered a round of Black and Tans and ogled the bras that hung above the top shelf like bunting, encouraged by the ceiling fans to occasionally flutter”. Even the seemingly dead zone of Heathrow’s duty free comes alive under her attention.
Life is not, of course, all amusements. While tourists come to Tramore for its chippers and arcades, “the local youngsters were up to no good”. But whereas “fellas didn’t have to abide by any rules”, girls are held to a different standard. “You didn’t have to do much if you were a girl to land yourself in trouble,” one resident recalls of her youth. “Having a fanny was enough”, with pregnancy the ultimate consequence. Of the girls who got pregnant at school, one married, one was shipped off to a relation in Cork, one was taken to Liverpool to terminate; all three were shunned.
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One of main threads of The Amusements is the story of Helen Grant, whom we first meet as a teenager, lovesick for her friend Stella Swaine. Helen dreams of going to study together in Dublin and listening to The Cure on loop. But after a false accusation by Stella’s mother, Nancy, Helen is sacked from her job at the grocer’s — a quick lesson in class. Stella switches schools and allegiances, and Helen’s dreams of escape sputter and die like a damp firework: while Stella ends up pursuing art in New York, Helen stays in Tramore to look after her alcoholic father. One of the unwritten rules for girls, she notes, is to “get out before you’re twenty, or you’ll have to abide by the rules forever”.
Stories from The Amusements have appeared on RTÉ Radio 1 and Harper’s Bazaar, as the winner of its 2019 Short Story Competition. But the book is greater than the sum of its parts. In the vein of the linked stories of Elizabeth Strout and Brandon Taylor, there is the pleasure of making connections between the cast of characters as they intersect. Helen photographs the town butcher for a school project. Years later, we come across him as he tries to drum up the courage to ask out Nancy Swaine’s neighbour. We meet a home nurse who turns out to be caring for Helen’s father, and so on.
Spanning three decades, Flannery adds depth to her characters with the passage of time. We see Nancy at the end, demented in a nursing home but still “spitting venom”. Stella and Helen, out of touch since high school, finally reconnect when Stella returns for her mother’s funeral. “We do not choose who we love, and I would not have chosen Stella Swaine, yet here I was, my insides heaving at the prospect of talking to her again.” Helen’s story has the distinct flavour of what-ifs and disappointment, as in Honeymoon in Tramore, which depicts disillusionment after a wedding. And yet, like Trevor, a wry wit permeates Flannery’s storytelling.
Not all of the characters in The Amusements are unhappy with their lot. The owner of the caravan park fantasises about a young woman but finds his way back to a sexual connection with his wife. A tourist who discovers her husband’s infidelity while on holiday considers confronting him. Upon reflection, however, she thinks better of it, likening choosing a mate to picking kitchen tiles: “Honestly, after living with it for a while, she’d come to think it was the right choice.”
