Short Stories:Although primarily known as a searching and sincerely doubtful poet in the tradition of Gerard Manley Hopkins and RS Thomas, John F Deane is also a fine writer of fiction, especially short stories.
The Heather Fields and Other Stories By John F Deane Blackstaff, 247pp. £7.99
"Poetry is the main thing for me," he has said, "but anything that won't become poetry goes into fiction." The stories in his first two collections, Free Range(1994) and The Coffin Master and Other Stories(2000), are dominated by themes of repression, loneliness and mortality, yet there is a recurring insistence on the possibility of finding spiritual value in a brutalising, irreligious world. Even the most deadened mind, Deane suggests, can be revived by moments of sudden, spiritual manifestation.
The nine stories in Deane's third collection testify to a significant darkening of fictional vision. The volume is peopled by outsiders, loners and eccentrics, those who have been sidelined by our speeded-up society. Most of the protagonists are in retreat from what one narrator calls "the broken and breaking world", none more so than Reynolds, whose journey of "innocent foolishness" is chronicled in the title story, a novella set in a remote island community. Following a boating accident in which his friend, a monk, perishes, Reynolds barricades himself into his house and resolves to "become zero". His seclusion is the perverse apotheosis of his long-held desire for self-annihilation, a desire that once drew him to the monastic life. But the local monastery school was also the place where, as a slow and stammering child, he was mocked by pupils and teachers alike.
The story's muted polemic critiques the destructive undertow of "the glitter-days of the new and confident Ireland" and deplores the corrosive effect of secular individualism on the country's soulscape. The eclipse of a once resilient Christian value system is subtly figured towards the end of the novella, when the monastery is bulldozed and the heather fields levelled to make way for houses, shops and a garden centre "where you could buy a fine variety of exotic heathers incapable of withstanding the island winds".
Elsewhere in the volume, Deane expresses his disaffection with society's spiritual bankruptcy with less subtlety. Casualty culminates in a glimpsed image of a broken crucifix in a hospital corridor, Christ's right arm having fallen loose from the crossbeam. The symbolic force of this image is instantly blunted by the solemn didacticism of the next sentence: "The world moved on underneath the figure as if that very crucifix were invisible".
Casualty is one of several stories that register Deane's pessimism about his characters' ability to survive the menacing depredations of contemporary life. The volume's keynote is one of cosmic futility; what shafts of light there are are febrile and fleeting. Even the natural world, which functions as a source of redemption in Deane's most recent poetry collection, The Instruments of Art(2005), is given limited power here to offset despondency. In The Long Goodbye, an old woman's joy in nature's seasonal renewal is nullified by her bleak intuition of "how stunningly quickly everything grew tarnished, as if the labouring of humans did little more than infect the earth with lassitude", while in The Photograph, the narrator's delight in the ordinary goodness of the day is overshadowed by his intense awareness of "what the whole of humanity has to suffer in its straining for life". This pervasive mood of pessimistic enfeeblement is encapsulated by the conclusion of the final story, The Language of Hands:
After that millennial silence, more terrifying than any silence has ever been, I went back inside my empty house and poured myself a large glass of whiskey. I left the old calendar, 1999, hanging on the wall. Why should I take it down and put the new one in its place. What would be the point?
Despite the ubiquity of such gloomy perspectives, there is much verbal beauty and formal virtuosity to admire in this collection. The parabolic intensity of The Photographmakes it one of the two standout stories in the book, the other being the glancingly evocative Fever. Both are finely poised between reality and nightmare and, in achieving their effects with ruthless brevity, show Deane to be at his best when working within the compressed limits of poetic minimalism.
Liam Harte lectures in Irish literature at the University of Manchester. His book,Modern Irish Autobiography: Self, Nation and Society , will be published by Palgrave Macmillan shortly.