Travel: Anyone picking up Travelling Light and expecting 32 bits of fluff to while away their beach-time, may put it down again and prepare themselves. By and large this is anything but a light read, some pieces are very serious indeed and most have a dark and often disturbing side, which belies not only the title, but also the 1960s-glam cover design, writes Christine Dwyer Hickey.
Even the stories that start off full of girlish promise, such as Claire Dowling's 'Miami Vice', Jean Butler's 'A Bed Called Home' and Marita Conlon-McKenna's 'St Tropez', stick a long neat skewer through the heart before leaving you slightly gobsmacked. Poverty, that great holiday-pooper, makes several appearances, most searingly with Marian Keyes in Ethiopia and again in Morocco - the most popular destination, by the way - where we find deformed beggars and young boys offering themselves to elderly Germans on the beach. "How can you be a happy tourist concentrating on tanning after this?" asks Ciara Dwyer in her astute portrayal of that enigmatic country. Thankfully, this question remains unanswered, or we may all unpack our bags and never go on holiday again.
All backgrounds are represented in this collection - Catherine Donnelly's poor-little-rich-girl holidaying with strangers while she waits for her parents to show up; the pre-pubescent Julie Parsons, not missing a beat throughout the long voyage on the rust bucket that was the SS Fairsea. There is no shortage of coming-of-age stories, by far the best of which is Catherine Dunne's accomplished and outstanding exploration of Madrid in the 1970s.
Some pictures you simply can't get out of your head, the colour and drama of a bus journey from Madras to Bangalore, courtesy of Cauvery Mahavan; Suzanne Power's depiction of Peru - "a front-line experience in surrealism"; and bath-time with Morag Prunty in a Moroccan hammam.
Not all pieces work - one or two are a bit too hippy-dippy for my own particular hard-boiled taste - but these are few enough not to matter. Nor does an exotic location guarantee a good story, particularly where there is a tendency to drag the reader along on every leg of the journey, detail by detail. There are exceptions of course, and plenty of 'em, notably from the two veterans - Dervla Murphy whose "just the facts ma'am" attitude makes her story all the more chilling and of course Mary Russell's shrewd powers of observation taking us with her right into the streets of Baghdad. Rosita Boland deserves mention too, for her story, 'Burma, Burma', the core of which has such a distinctive mood as to read like the opening pages of a novel - one I would like to continue reading.
Other stories succeed because of their honesty. Anne Marie Hourihane, witty and intelligent as always, looks at the strain on relationships in 'Worst Holidays'. And closer to home Tina Reilly's trip with the toddler from hell, a story all too familiar to myself.
Plenty of snippets keep the reader going throughout: Mary Henry tells us about the Bobby Sands Take-Away in Iran and the Bobby Sands Boulevard where the British embassy majestically stands; Martina Devlin reports from the mini-bar of a Russian hotel room where alongside refrigerated drinks and miniature snacks, packets of condoms are stocked.
A lovely touch, in my opinion, and one that brings a whole new meaning to the term "cool customer".
The authors involved in Travelling Light stand to make nothing from this enterprise having donated all royalties (€1.28 from every copy sold) to Kisiizi Hospital in Uganda. The book retails at €9.99. A worthy book then for a worthy cause - but at €9.99 surely a little more could be found somewhere along the commercial chain?
Christine Dwyer Hickey's latest novel, Tatty, is published by New Island
Travelling Light: An Anthology. Edited by Sarah Webb, Tivoli, 335pp. €9.99