Sean O'Reilly's debut collection of short stories introduces an original and affecting voice in Irish fiction, one inflected by a muted pathos and bleak lyricism. Almost all of the characters in these eight stories are lonely, troubled outsiders driven by emotions carried over from some previous trauma. In "A Charmer" a woman sifts through the emotional debris of her relationship with a morose youth who killed himself. "Portraiture" features a man tormented by a frustrated desire for his lover, which issues forth as an impotent rage, "a terrible dry wailing", whereas the emotionally detached narrator of "Rainbows at Midnight" says of his affair with a married woman: "I never slept with her and I don't think I wanted to". Each faltering attempt to connect with others seems merely to confirm the protagonists in their existential loneliness; as the narrator of "Skull Stick" puts it, "it's only the pain that connects them".
O'Reilly's native Derry and its hinterland provide an appropriately liminal setting for many of these narratives of dislocation and desolation. Yet the reality of the Troubles is seldom registered at anything more than a subliminal level, as "the insinuating hum" of an army helicopter. This is because, for many of the protagonists, the public conflict has been overshadowed by the intimate violations of the private sphere, which is both their refuge and their prison. Several stories take us behind the closed curtains of the cover photograph to observe "the intricate turmoil of so many lives". O'Reilly's powers of characterisation are seen to their best effect in his depiction of figures such as Eddie Mulholland, a reclusive sociopath, and Henry O'Hagan, a lonely ascetic who feeds communion hosts to an abandoned dog. Such characters are sensitively drawn, though the gruesome end the author fashions for O'Hagan suggests an affinity for the macabre surrealism of Patrick McCabe and Mike McCormack.
Throughout the collection, O'Reilly brings a freshness of description and insight to bear upon his disaffected subjects. Single sentences - "Her voice was Irish, northern, farmstock, dark bare hills and cratered roads" - carry an evocative freight, and audacious conceits continually detain the eye: a "dilapidated" swan "zips and unzips the body-bag water"; daylight is "comical and extravagant". Such linguistic ingenuity is matched by a readiness to take formal risks, as evidenced by the fragmentary narrative of "Dans La Rue" and the oblique narration of "The Good News".
"Rainbows at Midnight", however, suggests a deeper concern with the ethics and aesthetics of art. The story deals with a relationship between a struggling writer and an unhappy wife, who, when her husband leaves her, is rejected in turn by him. The fact that her sudden, violent death acts as his creative catalyst forcefully confronts him with the callous potential of the artistic imagination, the reality that his words have been forged from her bullet wounds.
In a prescient, proleptic moment before her death, the woman rebuked the writer's artistic exploitation of ordinary people: "Don't you think you should ask their permission first? If you're going to steal them and order them about and fit them into some story and they can't do a thing about it. You could have them blown to pieces and they couldn't stop you". O'Reilly's subtle treatment of such a complex, self-reflexive theme is a measure of the intellectual depth and maturity of the collection as a whole. Curfew and Other Stories is a pungent debut which confirms the robust good health of the Irish short story.
Liam Harte is Senior Lecturer in Irish Studies at St Mary's College in London. He is the co-editor of Contemporary Irish Fiction: Themes, Tropes, Theories, just published by Macmillan