There’s something distinctly, wondrously Irish about the stories collected in Four Night Seas, all of which are quiet and subtle and yet, in their quiet subtlety, stunning. They read like waking out of dreams, or like stories you forgot you knew already. Preoccupations and scenes rise up and are repeated throughout, with different images appearing across the collection like lighthouse flashes; dangerous midnight sea swims, foxes, troubled children, mountains, isolation, love.
Mac Cabe is a master of the short story, there’s no question, yet they don’t reek of that heavy-handed excess of mastery the Americans often bring to the form – in other words, ego. They’re clean, rather than neat. This is done in a way I have never seen achieved so well by a contemporary Irish author. The closest likenesses I can think of are the urban writers Maeve Brennan or Mary Beckett. Yet here, we have a writer of their calibre creating today’s rural west of Roscommon, Leitrim, Connemara, Donegal.
This distinctive Irishness is encapsulated, I think, in the strangeness of the stories, coupled with their equally strange familiarity. Mac Cabe doesn’t write in any sort of ‘fadó fadó in Éireann’ way, nor do the stories achieve their native character from that ever-popular ‘laughing gas and Nissan Micra to the session’ way, either. Rather, here is something subtler, more granular, captured in the characters’ phraseology, but also in their peculiar ways of blindly feeling out the world.
In a nation of ham, both edible and metaphorical, this capturing of cultural identity without resort to cliche is striking. But then, at times, these stories are so precise, the language so elegant, they read like they could’ve been written on the edge rather than the face of the pages. Here is the slightly sad, confused, lost Ireland in which many of us are attempting to live, and to find meaning.
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And yet, again typical of the island, there isn’t a story herein that doesn’t contain humour. Most end on a note of hope, offering a delightful subversion of our dour, post-Christian expectations, which tend to equate despair with truth.
Reading Four Night Seas, I felt the deep pleasure of the unexpected, and I look forward to rereading it slowly, lingeringly, with the care such writing deserves.
