Short Stories: As one of Ireland's most popular contemporary dramatists, Billy Roche has been favourably compared to canonical precursors - Chekhov, Miller, Sam Shephard - but perhaps his true mentor is the poet Patrick Kavanagh. Roche's artistic fealty to his native Wexford marks him out as a writer whose aesthetic is most indebted to the poet's provocative valorisation of the parochial over the provincial (and, indeed, the national).
It is not merely Kavanagh's conviction that the parochial writer "is never in any doubt about the social and artistic validity of his parish" that Roche's work upholds; it also sustains his belief that true art has its origins in empathy and love.
It is, of course, a love tempered by exasperation and impatience. Just as Kavanagh abjured the "stony grey soil of Monaghan" where he was "king/ Of banks and stones and every blooming thing", Roche is ambivalent about the pull of home. "You love the place you come from, and hate it," he has said, "because you have a stake in it." His dramatic characters, too, wrestle with the contradictions of cleaving to places where the spirit dies. "A man without a hometown is nothin," declares Joe in Poor Beast in the Rain, only to have his credo nullified by Steven's doleful remark: "This town'll be the death of me yet". Both statements are true.
Roche's short fiction plays fresh variations on these themes. The 12 stories in this, his first collection, published by a new, Kilkenny-based press, form a suite in which people and places reappear, creating a web of echoes and correspondences. The eponymous pond is the sole constant in all 12 tales. This "desolate and magnetic place" is mute witness to a myriad of emotions: intense passion, gnawing remorse, abject sorrow. Reputedly bottomless, the pond is mirror, repository and shroud all in one. In its brackish waters drowned bodies commingle with stillborn fantasies and illicit desires. Some, such as Matty Larkin in One Is Not a Number, imagine it to have transformative, healing properties; others, like Maggie Angre, see it only as a place of treachery and death.
Roche has always been interested in the mythic potential of mundane lives, in characters who crave some form of transcendence as much as they do human comfort. Yet most of the protagonists in these stories are without sanctuary, marooned in the backwash of thwarted dreams and faded illusions. Leo, the narrator of the opening story, Haberdashery, is typical in this regard. His recollection of his unrequited love for Evelyn suggests a life of wasted energy and unutterable emotion. Even those on the threshold of happiness, such as the engaged couple in Verdant, harbour longings that contain the seeds of future misery.
In his stories, as in his plays, Roche uses carnivalesque public spaces to accentuate characters' spiritual and emotional emptiness, yet he is also concerned to grant them a capacity for love and tenderness, even if they believe this to be a thing of the past, as does the disaffected wife in Northern Lights. In this story, the anecdotal tone and artless style suits the messiness and neediness of the protagonists' emotional entanglements. Elsewhere, however, Roche's control of the short story form falters, especially in the longer pieces, where a lack of expressive tautness leads to what Henry James called "weak specification", a failure to illuminate a discrete moment of truth. The best story in the volume, Sussex Gardens, a meditation on love and loss, succeeds precisely because it manages to body forth such an illumination in the space of seven pages. Like a stone dropped in a pond, the implications of the story's subdued denouement ripple in the imagination long after the final sentence.
Tales From Rainwater Pond By Billy Roche Pillar Press, 294pp. €12.99
Liam Harte lectures in Irish and modern literature at the University of Manchester. His Ireland Beyond Boundaries: Mapping Irish Studies in the Twenty-first Century, co-edited with Yvonne Whelan, will be published by Pluto Press in November