YOU wouldn't go too far wrong if you judged these two excellent new collections of short stories by their covers, both designed by Jon Berkeley. The Grainne Dowling etching on the cover of Angela Bourke's By Salt Water, reproduced with a fine matte finish, is of a young girl in profile, sitting in serene contemplation. Behind her is a background of abstract lines and squiggles, suggesting perhaps the wallpaper of one of the domestic scenes of the stories inside, while also resembling particles suspended in the water of the title. The muted charcoal grey and blue colouring of the cover prepares us for Bourke's understated prose, which seems so effortless that it is as soothing as the cover itself.
Interspersed among the seventeen stories of this collection are the six "Una stories", in which comprise various instances the life of a young girl, Una, growing up in the city (probably Dublin) and holidaying in the country. The other stories, most of which are first person narratives, and all of which revolve around the figure of a young woman (each story's central character has a different name, but the overall effect is that it is always the same person), are based on fairly bleak events. But for all the bereavement, abandonment, isolation and death, the stories yield that strange kind of pleasure to be found in melancholy.
The stories are highly charged, to be sure, but they have a puzzling and compellingly neutral charge. The salt water crops up in different guises in many of the stories the liquids of life (blood, tears, amniotic fluid, the sea) are present through all the stories, but they never gush uncontrollably. They are simply there, and the characters are (like the girl on the cover) suspended in it. The writer is, as she says in her dedication, "afloat".
The cover of Ciarin Folan's Freak Nights is unattractive by comparison with Bourke's. Superimposed on to a messy background of green and blue brush strokes are two garish images which would be more at home in a cheap advertisement. On the right is a woman applying lipstick, looking seductively at the (male?) viewer, and beside her is a shiny American car. Overlaid with a glossy finish, this cover promises a more sordid and disquieting range of theme than Bourke's book.
Folan's twelve stories are very impressive. Whereas Bourke uses the short story form so unobtrusively, Folan plays around with the shape and size of the form. This he does mainly through questioning ideas of beginnings and endings. The opening story, A Nice Story, gives us the last few days of acrimonious fighting which end a long term relationship. Start of9 Great Adventure tails off just as the main character begins to relate a story about the enigmatic figure of his estranged son. Conclusions and denouements are given too soon, or else withheld when they are most expected. People drink too much in almost every story, always in the wrong place at the wrong time. Everything is slightly out of kilter.
Folan is illustrating the arbitrary nature of where the storyteller draws the lines which mark the start and end of a story. By extension, the notions of story and storytelling are also under scrutiny. His presentation of the stories to us is deliberately mystifying the titles are obscure and, bear only tenuous relations to their stories. The reader is undermined and unsettled by this book (and by its cover) in a very deliberate and effective way. Because of this it is perhaps too alienating and antagonistic.