THE sixteen stories in Molly McCloskey's first collection, Solomon's Seal, settle happily into the very vital American short story tradition, although the author has been living and working in Ireland since 1989. Rather than telling an intricate tale, McCloskey plucks a period of time and bathes it with a fine authorial perception so that it becomes like an old and evocative snapshot. The driving force of plot is sacrificed to a delicate and amorphous catalogue of emotions and memories: "We play tag with our blame, only now all of our running and chasing is inside our own heads, instead of out on the big green lawn behind our house.
It says much for McCloskey's sensitive choice of subject matter - that these reflective stories usually avoid a descent into the obscure or the self indulgent. Loss abounds in Solomon's Seal: loss of a mother to a new and alcoholic lover in "Fireflies"; loss of a child in "Hands", "They Just Don't Work" and "Love", and, perhaps most pathetically of all, the recurring loss of a much loved friend or sibling to madness, as in "Family Photos" and "Losing Claire".
Another kind of loss, the loss of innocence, also gives good results in McCloskey's hands. The title story of the collection traces the moments and resonances of an affair between a stepfather and his deceased wife's child; it is in the description of emotive, complex situations like this that McCloskey's light touch shows to strong effect. Indeed, most of the stories in Solomon's Seal which deal with relationships seen from within benefit from Molly McCloskey's treatment, especially in, for example, "Strangers", a most poignant and intricately textured description of a marriage in jeopardy.
Only in some of the stories, such as "The Wedding Day" or "You Used to be My Mother", is there a lack of event or progress and an over indulgence in weighty one liners: "She tells herself she brought forth a life that knows only sadness" is wearying, alienating and pointless. In general, though, Solomon's Seal is a deft and thoughtful first collection.
Michael Carragher's A World Full of Places is a curiously old fashioned collection. The stories for the most part are set in an Ireland long gone, peopled with Big Jemmys, Paddy Joes and Eiley Barratts, and telling of ambushes, bailiffs, farms and banshees. Sprinkled a little uneasily amongst these are stories set in contemporary or almost contemporary Ireland that dwell on boys and motorbikes ("Underneath the Sky"), marital trauma in Galway ("Horns of a Whimsical Eden"), and the resonance of immigration ("Strange Sounds of a Faroff Land").
What ties the collection together is Carragher's abiding fascination with myths and mythologies; the tales of glorious insurrection from the 19th century to today that are made grubby by cowardice or perhaps something more complex; the abiding belief in banshees, fairies and pisogs that cannot be believed in and yet will not go away; and the eternal struggle of man against nature.
Carragher's strength is in the twist he puts on oft told tales - the IRA hard man who reads The Portrait of Dorian Gray, and the Irish rebel who shoots a horse in pain rather than his tyrant landlord. Carragher relishes myth: more often than not his stories revel in the nobility of mind and limb of men of action, whether they are ambushing Protestants or leaving their wives.
It is not so much that Carragher is taking overarching ideologies at face value as that he is a little too much in love with the "man alone" school of writing. Women are shockingly absent in all the stories, shadowy creatures to be impregnated, abandoned, lusted after or ignored, while Carragher's men go unquestioningly about their male business. This machismo in style and content results in a collection that seems outdated and strangely flat, despite Carragher's well tuned sense of dramatic tension and place.
