While reading this playful, superb collection, I happened to hear the music of Fat Dog, a band founded during the lockdown and whose energetic mash-up of genres, breadth of influences and chaotic defiance of traditional classification kicks against the enforced idleness in which they were formed. This shares a sensibility with Louise Hegarty, who seems incapable of pat conventionality or primness.
Set mostly against the backdrop of post-recession Ireland, these stories are a formally promiscuous, dark, jolting and rapturous celebration of the possibilities of short fiction.
The opening story, a blend of modern-day realism with psychological allegory in the form of an interactive fiction PC game, risks tipping into hipster zaniness:
>inventory
READ MORE
you are carrying:
house keys
phone
wallet
a glowing Elvish sword
But well ahead of page 50, the reader is utterly won over by the voice – or voices, plural; the collection as a whole is wonderfully inventive and various.
Take the account of mass hysteria that reads like an Angela Carter parable written with the antic polyphony of a late Will Self. Or the dark delineation of menace and male violence set in post-crash Ireland, with a protagonist who could have skulked in from a Kevin Barry novel, except that the story is presented in a triple-entry form with separate columns for him, his wife and his workplace.
One absurdist narrative could be Kafka’s Metamorphosis script-doctored by George Saunders. The title story is a documentary history of Ireland’s rural electrification, quoting biographies, poems, tweets, homilies, radio transcripts and more (Hegarty’s ludic ability to slip between voices is perhaps the most salient feature of the book). Stealthily, improbably and characteristically, this accretes into a moving account of the tragic cost of modernity.
The assured exuberance of the collection is not a surprise: Hegarty’s work will be known to readers of The Stinging Fly, The Dublin Review and Banshee. She won the inaugural Sunday Business Post/Penguin Ireland Short Story Prize. And last year her debut novel, Fair Play, was released to acclaim. But for all the literary gamesmanship, Hegarty is warm, funny, enjoyable company.
It’s difficult to imagine a more perfect dispatch from 2020’s Ireland than Borges for the CMAT generation – and here it is.
Peter Lonsdale is a writer and former lecturer living in Ireland.
