ROBERT HARBINSON is not primarily known as a writer of fiction - as a matter of fact, he is not primarily known as Robert Harbinson, for it is under his real name of Robin Bryans that he did most of his work: a number of volumes of travel writing, and the editing of some-short story anthologies.
But under his assumed name he has brought out four books of autobiography and two of short fictions, and it is from these that Selected Stories (Lagan Press, £4.95 in UK) are taken, edited by John Keyes. Harbinson was born in Belfast in 1928, into a respectable, working-class Protestant family, but proved to be wild, head-strong and well above average in intellect. For a boy of his gifts, imprisoned by class and poverty, there was only one way out: the Church.
Given a scholarship to the Barry School of Evangelism in South Wales, he graduated cum laude and was sent off to Canada to convert the Indians there. Somewhere on the way, however, he misplaced his vocation, the Indians were left unconverted, and Bryans instead wrote the first of his excellent travel books.
The opening short story here, "Benedicite", owes something to his studies to become a missionary. In it the elderly Miss Skelly returns to her native glens of An- trim after labouring for forty years in the mission fields of India. One of the things that had kept her going was the thought of her cottage in the remote Ant rim countryside.
She settles in, decorates the place with her Indian artifacts and slowly comes to realise that her dream had been a chimera which has led her full circle back to where she is now yearning for India. How she resolves her dilemma is beautifully and comically conveyed, regaining as she does her "blue remembered hills" in the fog and rain-shrouded environs of London.
Most, if not all, of these short fictions were written in the Sixties. The style is full-bodied, flowery and even a little orotund. But they slip soothingly into the mind in comparison with some of the flash writing of modern times.
Most pieces have a dying fall, as in "L'apres-Midi d'un Faune", where the grave and serious little boy has his whole view of life turned upside-down by his first orgasm, or in "Man in a Pub", where the cast of a pantomime unites to save Tinker, the horse that pulls Cinderella's coach.
Other themes are touched on, such as middle-class puritanism and the Protestant ethos, initial cracks in the seemingly impregnable edifice of establishment life in Belfast, the unreality of the land of heart's desire, and the hidden agendas beneath the music and jollity of hellfire religion. All in all, Harbinson's fictions provide a fascinating insight into the fabric of Ulster society before the advent of the so-called "Troubles".
Michael Foley's The Road to Notown (Blackstaff Press, £7.99 in UK) is the complete antithesis of Harbinson's measured prose and old-world content. This is a Rabelaisian novel full of movement, comment, aphorisms, characters, and knowing asides about everything from marital breakdown to Northern Irish cultural mores.
When we meet the narrator, he is fresh out of university and dew- wet behind the ears. But his Candide-like innocence soon vanishes as he begins to make his way in life. He takes up teaching, gets involved in moving about from place to place - down to Dublin, across to London, back to the North falls in and out of love, and sees twenty years disappear in the vortex of his own restless energy.
There are a number of memorable characters maybe too many - in this imaginative flight of fancy, but the stand-out is Kyle Magee, a larger-than-life beer-swilling novelist, painter and lover. Our hero never seems to tire, although this reader at times wished for a calmer pace.
A good and exciting novel, though, if taken in short doses, and there is a lot of black humour in Mr Foley's eccentric characters and set-pieces. As a commentary on the Irish literary scene, North and South, it is bravely perspicacious.