It’s often claimed that Irish writers, perhaps more than any other nation, have made the short story form our own. But while many novelists publish the occasional collection, gathering pieces that might have originally appeared in magazines or anthologies, fewer specialise in the form, producing books actively written as collections, offering connections between each tale in the way, say, that James Joyce did in Dubliners or, more recently, Cecelia Ahern in Roar, where 30 women go through life-changing experiences that shape the book’s narrative.
While the Belfast writer Lucy Caldwell has published several well-received novels, she clearly holds a passion for the shorter form. Multitudes (2016), Intimacies (2021), and Openings (2024) have now been joined by Devotions. Four collections in a decade is quite something and, happily, it does not disappoint.
It opens with Hamlet, A Love Story, a thoughtful narrative on the nature of loss. A young widow, an actress in an experimental production of Hamlet, recalls her love affair with an actor who died tragically young, her recollections arising when she finds herself in the bed of the actor who’s taken his part in the play. The references are erudite, the choices she’s faced with not dissimilar to the Dane’s, and the characters, even the pretty boy leading man, are kind. It sets the scene for the internal narratives that lie ahead.
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The female protagonist of A Family Christmas is also coping with loss but of a different kind. The man she loves has not died but is seriously ill with depression, leaving her to cope with the ceaseless shouting of prepubescent twins and the possibility of an unexpected and unwanted baby, all while preparing for a busy December. The benign title proves rather chilling for this is no heartwarming festive tale but one that reveals a person barely holding on to her sanity and for whom the future looks bleak.
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For reasons linked to my own youth, however, I liked Little Lands the most. An inventive account of how parents can pass on sentimental attachments to their children, it’s built around The Sound of Music, in particular the scene in which Maria and Captain Von Trapp dance the Ländler together, falling in love while the Baroness looks on, realising she has lost the widower to the postulant. In the hands of a lesser writer, this could be little more than an essay submitted for a film studies class, but in Caldwell’s it becomes so much more. It’s moving, heartfelt and, like the source material, transcends sugary sentimentality, evolving into something that only a grinch could fail to enjoy.
Music plays a role in Harmony Hill too, when a professional violinist travels to a speaking engagement in Belfast and worries for the wellbeing of her 300 -year-old violin. As with Little Lands, memories from the past rise up when she recalls the lessons she took as a girl and her mother’s participation in them. This pair of stories are linked by the theme that what happens to us when we’re young, both good and bad, reverberates throughout our lives. As with the references in Hamlet, A Love Story, Caldwell displays a scholarly understanding of the instrument. There isn’t a moment in either piece where the lines come across as researched; instead, they read as the words of someone who knows exactly what she’s talking about.
Although not the title story, All Grown Up feels like the central story of the collection. Focusing on a man and woman who vaguely knew each other as teenagers, and then cross paths again in middle-age, it’s a poignant tale about decent people who find themselves a little lost but aching for an understanding ear. And, again, it echoes to A Family Christmas with the dilemma that one of them faces.
Children appear time and again throughout Devotions. Some happy. Some killed. Some on the cusp of leaving childhood behind. Some aborted. Relationships between parents and their offspring are to the fore, even for those who’ve died but return as ghostly presences through the medium of a psychic.
An entire literary festival could be dedicated to the question of which is more difficult to write, a great novel or a great short story. The former can move at a leisurely pace, allowing digressions and subplots, but stories need to stay on point, delivering their punch with the skill, speed and precision of Katie Taylor. One gets to the end of Devotions feeling that Caldwell has spent so much time in the ring, and understands the territory so well, that it would be a brave writer who would strap on the gloves to challenge her.
