SHORT STORIES Country of the Grand By Gerard Donovan Faber and Faber, 234pp. £9.99'WHY DO WE always see the past as down?" This is the question posed by a character in a signal story in Gerard Donovan's vividly probing new collection, Country of the Grand.
It is a concern that preoccupies all of the tales in this volume. The effects of the passage of time on human relations - especially marital ones - is a problem that needles Donovan's protagonists and sets them off kilter.
Contemporary Ireland serves as the setting for most of the the stories in this volume. However, akin to the abstract symbolic geographies of Donovan's accomplished and poetic novels, the country depicted is defamiliarised and unsettling. Galway city and its periphery and the motorway out of Dublin are occasionally mentioned. Donovan keeps us off-centre and on the edge of things. In these stories, he explores states of mind that are in-between places and for which maps do not supply reliable co-ordinates.
Country of the Grand traces the faultlines of modern Ireland. The title nicely ironises the troubled terrain that opens up in each of these successive stories. Despite the efforts of the protagonists to act as if everything is grand, as everyday Irish parlance would have it, the surface realities of their worlds are peeled away to reveal the jagged personal accommodations they have made and the unappeasable emotional turmoil lurking beneath. The Ireland that Donovan depicts is a haunted place in which the past continuously waylays and unfixes the present.
In Archaelogists, the dig in progress is a perfunctory one as the site being uncovered is due to be incorporated into a new development. Instead of reconstructing the past, archaeology has been co-opted by the forces of modernity to repress and bury it. The contractor, Touhy, impatiently waits with his machines for the completion of the dig so that he can start construction. The dead we are told in the story "do not need explanation".
However, the tensions between Emma and Robert, two young archaelogists involved in completing the official report on the site, reveal not just their emotional differences but also their varying views of the past. While Robert can accommodate the reigning materialism, Emma is troubled by the gradual obsolescence of her trade, as a field archaeologist, and by the way in which the new Ireland is resolutely building over all traces of antiquity.
Neither, however, is vindicated in this tale, which subtly uses archaeology not just to reflect on the skewed values of modern Ireland but to dissect the personalities and project the future of these two ill-assorted lovers.
If the discovery of an unknown portal tomb carries pointed symbolic weight in Archaeologists, Irish country roads themselves provide the pathways for the Gothic meditation of Irish Nights. This eerie story captures the collective grief of parents who have lost children to countless accidents in the Irish countryside. Their sleepless sorrow is meshed in the narrative with the restless ghostly journeys of their deceased offspring on anonymous country roads. Loss, as Donovan conveys it, is imprinted in the very topography of Ireland.
Other stories plot out very different affective geographies. Morning Swimmers, How Long Until, Shoplifting in the USA, Country of the Grand and Another Life all inspect the relations between married couples and the betrayals that underlie their seeming amity. Journeys and dislocating movement act in these tales as metaphors for the entangled emotional realities that are disclosed.
A daily swim with friends, the sudden decision to join a local charity race, a trip to Dublin to probate a husband's will, the drive to Galway prior to a stay with in-laws all precipitate complex revelations. Donovan portrays the plights of his figures with exactitude but never denies them empathy. Their emotional reckonings are finely calibrated and delicately narrated.
Country of the Grand is remarkable because of its concentration on the affective repercussions of the still unaccustomed prosperity of contemporary Ireland. But it does not produce slick diagnoses of current life. Rather, it forces the reader to look at the uncomfortable depths of everyday existence and to partake in the emotional trajectories of these interlocking stories. The capaciousness of Donovan's vision encompasses a medley of different figures, a child haunted by birds mourning the break-up of her parents' marriage, a mute young boy coming to terms with his mother's new suitors following the death of his father, a son who surreptitiously spirits his mother out of an old people's home for a walk in her wheelchair.
There are no forced epiphanies in these beautifully etched and skilfully crafted stories. Instead, Donovan makes us aware of the intricate but frequently repressed tracery of emotions that underwrites everyday life. His eloquent and masterly stories are at once intense reflections on the human condition and the deficits of contemporary Ireland, haunted by its refusal of the past and its obtuse denial of the psychic in favour of the material.
• Anne Fogarty is professor of James Joyce studies at University College Dublin