THE second novel by John F. Deane, Flightlines, tells a story which we have encountered many times before, mostmemorably in recent years in Martin Scorsese's film of The Age of Innocence and Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera. A love affair blossoms - suddenly and briefly between the two main protagonists (Jack and Grainne, in this case) while they are still in their youth, but then halts abruptly, leaving the two lovers to live in regret and destructive self denial for the rest of their lives.
Deane's novel is based around the life of a small community on an island off the west of Ireland in the 1930s, and the reasons for the failure of the love between Jack and Grainne can be largely ascribed to the restrictive morality of small town Catholicism. The keynote of this novel is flight; Jack succeeds in learning how to fly both actually as an RAF pilot and spiritually by leaving the island and its narrow breadth of vision behind. Grainne, unable to rise to the challenge of the outside world, restricts herself further by joining an enclosed convent on the island, and finds there a wholly spiritual elevation which is so intense that it almost kills her. Later, she leaves the convent and enters a stultifying marriage with a doctor from the midlands.
There is a consciousness in Flightlines of the ability of humans to step into an alternative realm which is out of this world yet also tied to it, in a way very reminiscent of South American magic realism. In an Irish setting, this book inevitably reminds the reader of Liam O Flaithearta's Dail, where human desire is the potent and volatile ingredient which allows physical human actions to have an impact on a more abstract, less earthbound level of experience.
Deane's treatment of these already tested themes and ideas is very successful, and because the tragedy of the love affair is not overblown and overwritten, it is genuinely very sad. The book's main characteristic is its obviousness; the reader does not feel that the text demands a great deal of digging below its surface to find the author's latent meanings. Whether or not this is a strength or a weakness, I am not sure.
The Strange and Other Stories is a collection of the eleven winning entries to the Fish Short Story: competition of 1995, plus an extra personal choice by Clement Cairns, the editor and orchestrator of the competition (his choice is one of my favourites, Footbalics Anonymous, by Breda Nathan). The three judges, Deirdre Madden, Dermot Healy and Roddy Doyle (who also supplies a brief introduction), who were unaware of any personal details of the writers, chose a very broad range of stories, seven by women and four by men.
There is no indication of what criteria were used in the judging of these stories, but it seems to me that they all, to differing degrees, are concerned with parent/child relationships and/or relationships between men and women. (The one exception to this is one of the best in the book, Conor Farrington's Virtuoso.) That these relationships are always under duress or are somehow dysfunctional, makes this collection a very melancholy and affecting read.
It is interesting to see where these writers, who represent the forefront of new Irish prose writing, find their sources of tension: in the very contemporary clashes between rural and urban life, within unhappy marriages, between traditional urban life and inner city drug culture, and between generational and class determined rifts in attitudes of sexuality. The volume is an extremely involving snapshot of modern Irish life and the writing which it produces.