Short Stories: In commemoration of the bar of soap that accompanies Leopold Bloom on his journey around Dublin, this slickly edited collection by the members of the M Phil in Creative Writing at Trinity College Dublin succeeds with Joycean panache in projecting numerous evocative fictional worlds.
Ten short stories alternate with four sequences of poems in this fluidly orchestrated volume. Each of the individual contributions strikes a strong note in its own right. Yet all of the compositions also chime in with and respond to each other. Unusually, this anthology is pervaded by a sense of camaraderie and of co-operative enterprise.
Like the different life phases that structure Joyce's Dubliners, the stories here centre variously on skewed, off-centre childhood experiences, or on the ironic and discomfiting epiphanies of adulthood.
The teasing incompletion of these fictions seems to owe more, however, to the disorientating compactness of Raymond Carver and Dave Eggers than to Joyce's more expansive creations.
These almost-impossibly condensed stories open up pockets of experience but leave everything dangling and undecided. Settings and timeframes are evoked but rarely precisely realised.
Robert Monroe's 'Lesson' is the first of three stories conjuring up the heady cocktail of childhood summers, with their blend of adventure, sexual awakening and hovering danger. Monroe's protagonists discover friendship and the perils of breaking loose from adult constraints. Ruth Greenberg's 'Drowning' also positions two friends in that uncertain zone between youthful innocence and guilty sexuality. A near-escape from drowning leads not to relief but to the painful suppression of a first erotic stirring.
In 'Lying in the Grass' by Dudley Cruse, the suggestive memory of an older brother's long-forgotten girlfriend seems to provide a hidden commentary on the friendship between two young men, but any direct conclusions are deftly forestalled. Jeannette Pascoe's 'I Killed My Nanny On A Sunny Day', similarly, nicely captures the troubled vision of a little girl and her defiant dislike of her nanny.
Trudy Hayes in 'One Night Stand' and Catriona Mitchell in 'When Something Dear Goes Missing' both expertly utilise the short story's capacity to deliver absurd dénouements in their comic accounts of the failed relationships of their misguided heroines. An absurd logic of a different kind dominates 'Double Entries' by Karen Bender, as a husband and wife try to make sense of his haphazard past.
The most accomplished stories in the collection, however, centre on the painful but bizarre compromises of adulthood, including Peter Sheridan's fiction about a young man's initiation into the sleazy world of escort services, Sarah Binchy's nuanced tale of a woman's memories of her dead mother and Frances Byrnes's account of an old man's unexpected proposal.
The poetry in this volume also provides a rich array of voices. The concision of Noel Connolly and the startling metaphors of Mark Lawlor contrast with Jacqueline McCarrick's vivid evocations of Lucia Joyce and Medusa and Alex Mavor's poised and complex free-verse narratives.
Lemon Soap is a stylish showcase of emerging talent and a delightful medley of polished writing. Leopold Bloom's bar of soap is in part a lure and a talisman. In similar spirit, as well as providing much to entice the reader with an appetite for postmodern brevity, Lemon Soap is an auspicious début for many impressive new voices.
Anne Fogarty is senior lecturer in the school of English, University College Dublin