Colum McCann's seven-year career to date in prose has been fairly prolific. After his extraordinarily mature shortstory volume, Fishing the Sloe- Black River (1994), he quickly produced a first novel, Songdogs (1995), and followed that with his most widely acclaimed work, This Side of Brightness (1998), a novel that crystallised his emergent stylistic mixture of terseness and ascetic lyricism.
Now, with an intensification of the formal rigour evident in even his first stories, McCann has made the move - an exceptional one, especially in the Irish context - of returning to the short prose form. Every- thing In This Country Must contains, in order, two short stories of about equal length and a novella of just over 100 pages. All three pieces are focused on the contemporary society and politics of Northern Ireland. In the title story, some British soldiers help save from drowning the horse of a resentful farmer; in "Wood ", the young son and wife of a stroke-stricken and sceptical Presbyterian secretly prepare marching poles for the local Lodge; and in the novella, set in 1981 and baldly titled "Hunger Strike", the new Galway life of a young boy and his widowed mother is related as, in the background, the boy's uncle starves.
While McCann has recalled spending some childhood summers near Garvagh in Derry, and while the final story in Fishing did incorporate the Troubles as a discreet element, he has not heretofore shown himself to be overly concerned with Northern imperatives. Endemic or otherwise, few fiction writers tread this thematic territory sure-footedly. The ubiquitous pitfall is a variety of what Raymond Williams called "the false commitment of the inserted political reference", where the literary artist is displaced in favour of the bland reporter or where precise realities are registered only via a few in-the-background-the-bombs-were-going-off sentences.
McCann's novella intermittently stumbles into such falsity. There is no denying the bravery of approaching the subject area of the 1981 hunger strikes, but McCann is sometimes too strident: he weights a boy's mind with an unconvincing political self-consciousness ("He thought to himself that he was a boy of two countries") and, in the most rankling aspect of the entire book, he attributes to him images, metaphors and similes which, while resonant in themselves, damage his integrity as a child character ("As she yanked the door open it seemed to the boy that she was pulling at the side panel of a coffin ").
As evinced in, for instance, the ill-advised conclusion to Bernard MacLaverty's Cal (1983), perhaps the most difficult thing in any fiction on the Northern problem is to conclude, to find a way out. At the ending of "Hunger Strike" McCann makes no pronouncement on politics and employs, instead, a reflective scene in which the boy's apprenticeship in a kayak reaches a powerful climax. It is enough to suddenly rescue the entire story.
McCann's two shorter pieces, where the bareness of his style has an apposite mouthpiece in a child narrator, are flawless. In "Everything In This Country Must", Katie, presumably from a Catholic family, relates how her mother and brother were killed, and why, when British soldiers arrive to help with the rescue, her father wants their horse to drown. In "Wood ", Andrew's function, as he works with his mother in the family mill, is to reveal the personality of his sick father ("Daddy says he's as good a Presbyterian as the next, always has been and always will, but it's just meanness that celebrates other people dying"). With an elemental feel reminiscent of Eugene McCabe's work (the nonpareil in this area), these two pieces give primacy to the private human moment and avoid the denaturalisations of news-bulletin politics.
Occasional structural lapses aside, McCann's aesthetic is something like John McGahern's, insistent that a story is always better shown than simply told. His worldview is considered and calm with never a hint of the overweening quasi-wryness of some other writers of his young generation. With an alliance, here, of some fine cadences and a robust topicality, his increasingly successful splicing of aesthetic seriousness with social concern allows an unusual volume a density beyond its physical slightness.
John Kenny teaches in the English Department at NUI Galway.