Short Stories: Bernard MacLaverty is a deceptive writer: deceptively restrained, deceptively simple, deceptively ordinary. He inhabits his characters with a ventriloquist's ease, and slips across continents and generations to explore, with no trace of sentimentality or melodrama, humanity's everyday dramas.
Resident in Scotland for many years, he has not abandoned the themes of his native Ireland, and they recur in this volume with the same intensity as in his earlier work. Somehow, he manages to address the Troubles both directly and obliquely - that is to say, in the way most people experienced them. The collection's brief opening story, On the Roundabout, is a fine example of this: told years later in the first person, it recounts a man's unexpected encounter with his country's violence, as he and his family drive home to Belfast one evening in the early 1970s: "I was feeling the family man," he says, "Anne in the passenger seat, the two kids in the back - like something out of Norman Rockwell. Seat-belts weren't compulsory, but we were seat-belt kinda people." In this apparently trivial detail lies the inevitability of what follows: as a seat-belt kind of person - upright, that's to say - the narrator is compelled to stop when he sees "a bunch of the UDA" descend upon a hitchhiker at a roundabout. While his young family screams and weeps around him, he drags the bloodied and disoriented young man into the car and takes him to hospital. That is all: the event is a matter of minutes; but its repercussions - only glancingly referred to - mark him and his family for good. "Anyway that's what Belfast was like at that time," he explains in bald conclusion. It is a small incident, from which MacLaverty draws a small story; but one that carries within it far greater resonance.
Many of the other pieces gathered here function in similar ways, if less concisely. A Trusted Neighbour is also a recollection, of the friendship between a Catholic man and his Protestant policeman neighbour, and of the unspoken betrayal between them. Matters of Life and Death (1): Learning to Dance tells the story of a single, strange day in the lives of two young boys, taken in by their parents' glamorous, childless friends in the wake of their father's sectarian murder. And in the wonderful The Trojan Sofa, the force of internecine hatred is again revealed through an 11 year old's eyes: he is hidden inside a sofa sold by his Catholic father to a supposed British Major, in a scam whereby he will emerge when the house is empty to let his father's thieving gang into the house.
The boy's instilled prejudice emerges incidentally in his wandering thoughts, as he lies cooped up in the sofa, primarily concerned with needing to pee, when to eat his sandwiches, and whether his breathing is too loud. Memorable and bleakly funny, the story captures the banal everyday detail in which all dark acts are perpetrated: needing to pee is, in the end, more important than everything else.
The banality of evil is nowhere more powerfully conveyed than in the long story that lies at the centre of this book: Up the Coast is again framed as a memory, this time in the mind of a woman artist who recalls her brutal rape and the murder of her attacker. This would seem a story almost impossible to relate without excess or prurience, but in Mac Laverty's hands it is a masterful interweaving of her own experience and that of the chilling man who stalks her; and it becomes, too, a story about art and the power of the artist.
The author is not unaware of the risks and ironies in such an undertaking, as he makes explicit in The Clinic, the simple account of a man undergoing tests for diabetes. For diversion, he reads a Chekhov story, The Beauties: "He was struck yet again by the power of the word. Here he was - about to be told he had difficult changes to make to his life and yet by reading words on a page, pictures of Russia a hundred years ago come into his head. Not only that, but he can share sensations and emotions with this student character, created by a real man he never met and translated by a real woman he never met. It was so immediate, the choice of words so delicately accurate, that they blotted out the reality of the present." But moments later, he doubts the very power to which he has succumbed: "Was this not the worst of Hollywood before Hollywood was ever thought of? Audrey Hepburn - Julia Roberts - the stationmaster's daughter".
Very occasionally, MacLaverty's deceptions are less than perfect, and the willfulness of his simplicity can be felt, as in Matters of Life and Death (2): Visiting Takabuti, in which an old spinster takes her great-nephews to visit a mummy in the museum, and gives her life in the process; or in Winter Storm, in which a Scottish poet teaching in Iowa is caught in a blizzard and rescued with the news that his girlfriend will not abandon him. But even in these stories, which perhaps too readily grant us our craved narrative satisfactions, MacLaverty's sagacity and compassion are strongly in evidence. He is a writer who grasps the beautifully mundane detail in which all of us live, no matter the scale of our dramas, and who weaves with these threads a shimmering and meaningful cloth.
Claire Messud's new novel, The Emperor's Children, will be published by Picador in September
Matters of Life and Death By Bernard MacLaverty. Jonathan Cape, 232pp. £14.99