Two books of short stories Brian Friel finely crafted in the 1960s offer a foretaste of the dramatic themes that would dominate Translations', Lughnasa' and Faith Healer', writes Colm Toibin

BRIAN FRIEL'S TWO early books of short stories, The Saucer of Larks (1962) and The Gold in the Sea (1966), are fascinating for two reasons. Firstly, they throw light on the plays which Friel later wrote; some of them are filled with echoes which would become pure and memorable sound. Secondly, some of them are marvellous in themselves, the prose clear and filled with subtle rhythms, the characters and situations as gripping and at times as funny and wise as short stories by John McGahern or William Trevor.

The very first story, Among the Ruins, dramatised something which would animate Friel's imagination all his life -  the issue of home, of a lost home, of a possible and then an impossible homecoming. In the character of Joe, for example, who goes with his wife and children to visit his derelict home place, Friel also established a figure which would appear again and again in his stories and never fully in his plays, the figure of a mildly sensuous, highly sensitive man in early middle age in rural Ireland who has no property, and sometimes not a good job, but a developed way of noticing and noting, a man who is quiet-spoken, intelligent and is capable of immense disappointment.

Friel's work with this figure in stories such as Foundry House, Everything Neat and Tidy, The Widowhood System and Ginger Hero pays due homage to the inwardness and the privacy of prose, the idea in fiction that something dull and quiet if rendered with enough sympathy and careful detail can become immensely powerful. Such figures on the stage could, on the other hand, merely seem sullen and undramatic.

The drama in the stories comes primarily from the sense of character but is also animated much of the time by event and action, which is always convincing and rendered with considerable skill and, at times, brilliant pacing and tension, the pigeon racing in The Widowhood System, for example, or the chilling, exciting, deadly cockfight in Ginger Hero.

The idea of a rural family with at its head a teacher in a school soon for closure would make its way eventually into Translations and Dancing at Lughnasa. In some of these stories, such as The Fawn Pup, My Father and the Sergeant, which is one of Friel's best stories, and The Illusionists, the teacher is a father and the son is the narrator, the observant one.

In stories such as The Diviner and The Illusionists, we can hear early echoes of one of Friel's masterpieces, Faith Healer, echoes of what can happen in a closed community when an outsider comes with magic powers, of the sheer drama and uneasy comedy and shades of brutality the figure of such a trickster or magician can evoke. It is perhaps too easy to see the figure of the young boy in The Illusionists, whose father is a teacher, whose school is visited by a magician and who is fascinated by the possibility of running away with the magician, as a portrait of a figure who will grow to love illusions and spend his life creating them, but it is tempting, especially when we watch the tricks being set up and then deconstructed and almost mocked, to find an early version of the tension between Friel's plays Translations and The Communication Cord.

In these stories, Friel loves a disruptive presence, the dull peace of things being broken by an outsider, an interloper. In The Death of a Scientific Humanist, Mr Sing My Heart's Delight, Straight from his Colonial Success, the mere whiff of the outside world is exotic enough and compelling to ensure that things will never again settle. In My True Kinsman and Aunt Maggie, the Strong One, the interloper comes from within the family. There is an unforgettable moment in Aunt Maggie when the narrator, sitting by his aunt's deathbed with his mother, feels a huge revulsion as his mother catches his arm seeking support. No explanation is offered, just the detail, and it is one of the most powerful moments in these stories.

The dialogue Friel works with is sharp and perfect, and, despite the fact that many of these stories were first published in the United States, there is not a moment of soft stage-Irishness in them, but rather a gruffness, a clipped economy. So, too, the harsh beauty of the landscape of west Tyrone and Donegal is evoked in most of the stories using minimal effects. In The Saucer of Larks, the one story where landscape is described in detail, it is observed by the eyes of outsiders, two Germans who have come to disinter the body of a German pilot from the second World War.

In My Father and the Sergeant, there is a moment when the local parish priest, on finding evidence of inappropriate sexual behaviour towards a pupil on the part of a visiting teacher, manages to cajole the father of the young girl not to go near the police station but come instead to the parochial house and have a drink. Irish readers will have come to recognise the scene. The story was written close to 50years ago.

Some of the stories are very funny. At times the comedy is slightly too broad, the antics almost too theatrical, the mothers too easily ambitious for their sons and sour in their domesticity. But, nonetheless, Friel has ways of pacing the narrative, or twisting it around, or allowing a character a moment of quiet, unexpected desperation that make a number of his short stories classics of their kind.

OF ALL THE STORIES, the most mysterious and haunting is Foundry House and that is not merely because it became the basis for one of Brian Friel's most mysterious and haunting plays Aristocrats. It is also because of the figure of Joe Brennan, father of nine children, a radio and television mechanic, who goes to live in the gate lodge of the big house which belongs to the Hogans, which is close to the Derry-Belfast road. Joe's silences, his politeness, his tendency to be cowed and made shy by his social betters, his ability to notice and then keep what he notices to himself, his ways of remembering and being in the world, are rendered with real sympathy and care, with gravity and tenderness, the sort of care that you get in certain moments in George Moore, in Joyce's Dubliners, and also in some stories by Mary Lavin and John McGahern.
This mode of creating an ordinary temperament in fiction, of allowing silences to linger like small traces of danger, of forcing the reader gently to come close to, and almost experience, tender and unheroic levels of feeling, became one of the central strengths of North American fiction over the past 40 years in the work of Raymond Carver, Tobias Wolff, Richard Ford, Alice Munro and others. It remains fascinating to watch it develop in Friel, in a time before the stage became the focus of his imaginative systems, as he created a halo around the ordinary, a halo you barely notice until you put the book down and the images he has conjured up remain fresh and vivid and hard-won.