“But after she’d gone, I kept thinking about those trees. Because the only thing they’ll ever have to do is stand there, while blackbirds and sparrows and chaffinches come to land among the branches. To just stand there, all day long, their leafy outstretched arms full of song.”
The exquisite title story exhibits all the best qualities of this baker’s dozen of short tales – understatement, skilful economy of style, and, most significantly, deep compassion for humanity and an understanding of human foibles. In this instance, the narrator, Bird, is a juvenile “criminal”, victim of economic and aesthetic deprivation. The estate he lives in is named after a poet, but it is ugly, lacking any vestige of nature or beauty, while, like any young person, Bird yearns for beauty. His “crime” is in the realm of mischief, a dangerous prank with unforeseen devastating consequences. Who is the real offender?
A number of the stories focus on people who run foul of the law, an area in which the author, a barrister, has expertise – but he is never judgmental. Even when writing about a baby killer (Shepherdess), or a mother who will stop at nothing to protect her child-murdering teenage son (Mulligan), John O’Donnell tells the story, and allows us to make up our minds. We are invited to consider the flaws of black and white justice in tales of contemporary life, and of the past.
I’m not a big fan of historical fiction, but Pleading the Belly, invoking what I presume is a real legal loophole granting temporary exoneration to people condemned to death, is one of my favourites in the book. My second favourite was the perfect story, Rialto, an ostensibly simple account of an older woman’s accidental fall during a holiday in Venice – an ordinary situation everyone over a certain age can sympathise with, but well deserving literary treatment.
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Because a story is good, or great, not because of its content, its action, but thanks to the intelligence, imagination and skill of the writer. This collection indeed includes several dramatic and even shocking moments, but all the stories are united by authorial depth of understanding, emotional maturity – even kindness – and literary mastery.
Éilís Ní Dhuibhne’s Selected Stories (2023) is available from Blackstaff Press. She is the present Laureate for Irish Fiction.
