We wonder what Jane Austen or Anton Chekhov would have written had they had lived beyond their 40s. These days, most of us get there. Adrian Kenny has been writing for decades; now he is 80. Yea!
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Probably the stories in this collection emerged over several years, but there is a sense in all of a writer examining incidents and characters from the past, trying to figure out what really matters in life. The tone is gentle – he has left the noise and haste, everything that is superficial and ultimately futile, far behind. He’s not trying to prove anything, just viewing humanity with open-eyed serenity.
The first sequence in the collection comprises stories set mainly in London about people the narrator has met – Weekends in Deptford, for instance, is more or less a biography of a woman. “We had met in the Eighties, teaching English abroad, and since then I had visited her every year.” She’s an outsider, like most of the characters in the London stories, which focus on immigrants, Irish and other. “She grew used to the London impersonal cordiality. It was a language she had learnt.” The characters are interesting to the point of eccentricity, strongly drawn – almost Dickensian.
The later part of the book includes stories in a more traditional Irish short story form – introspective, lyrical. Many focus on Marcus, a Dubliner with roots in Mayo. Kenny captures perfectly the nuanced lives of the Irish person who moves between city and country: seasonal migrants, maybe, rather than the more dramatic emigrants whose hearts are shared, or split, over international borders. Marcus is at home in the quirky inner city of Dublin, but also in the depopulated Mayo village of his country ancestors. As he ages, distinctions between country and town mouse which seemed significant long ago have vanished|:
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“Years of casual meeting had worn all that away, and now they were simply cousins.”
While some of Kenny’s stories are dramatic, most deal with the small events that are the stock in trade of the classic short story, as of life. His writing is low key. Place and nature are keenly observed and exquisitely evoked. These stories are deep, thoughtful and, somehow, soothing – to be savoured one at a time. A lovely collection.
Éilís Ní Dhuibhne is laureate for Irish fiction
