“What if life isn’t neat enough for pat answers?” In the short story collection Imperfect Beings, Dermot Bolger explores the messier layers of our existence with skill and passion. Memory, regret, illness, love, loneliness – all our lifelong uncertainties are here, as well as those crucial, brief moments in time that haunt us forever.
In deft, fine strokes of detail throughout, his canvas bears witness to how often people walk through life dressed in deceit, self-deception and confusion. How time may not always heal, but can sometimes bring respite and how memory can also heal by evoking beauty and joy.
As with all Bolger’s works, he captures the stubborn, vibrant life force of his characters, flawed and often flailing in an Ireland that is hard as concrete. Sometimes it’s only in their internal world that they find solace, recalling glimpses of sun-filled holidays in guest houses where the milk has to be brought each morning from a nearby farmhouse, with the scent of polish on bare lino beneath sandy toes. The first exquisite night of sex in a first love affair; the tender, anger-edged comfort of caring for a loved one who is ill.
But more often memory is cruel: the spectres of alcoholism, poverty and childhood trauma follow individuals around like ghosts. In The Lady Captain, Eileen is haunted by a young man who has been dead for 49 years. In The Nine Iron, a man who has lost his wife feels like he is “going through the motions of a posthumous existence”.
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The Service Station Plaza reveals the fierce, self-protective solitude of a person with serious mental health issues. Carole was once a hopeful young woman seeking a “fresh start”. “I killed her off for my continued survival,” she tells her former lover in a chance meeting at a petrol station. The final story, which gives the book its title, discredits a family myth that explodes like Pandora’s box to reveal a multigenerational quagmire of deceit, abuse and betrayal.
If Bolger’s fiction canon kicked off with a cutting-edge novel about youth, then readers who have followed his powerful and extensive body of work since The Journey Home will appreciate this collection as the fine-tuned work of a mature, master writer addressing themes that ring true with the years.
Helena Mulkerns is a publisher and critic
