Big
issues
I’ve
been trying to pace my reading of Bernard MacLaverty’s books
since rediscovering his brilliance last year with Cal.
His output comprises a handful each of novels and story collections:
this is his latest, Matters of Life and Death, first
published in the UK in 2006. According to his excellent website
where he interacts with readers in the guestbook, there’s
nothing further in the pipeline yet. So let’s savour it.
Matters of Life and Death shows MacLaverty
stretching himself within his social realist perspective. The
stories range from four pages to almost sixty, but most settle
at twenty or so pages, the sort of length that is easily consumable
in one sitting without the reader feeling short-changed.
Assembling a collection of stories must be a little
like putting the songs in order for an album tracklisting. MacLaverty
opens with ‘On the Roundabout’, a punchy - this is
the four-pager - overture of two recurring motifs in the book:
violence and Ireland, those happy bedfellows. Then there’s
‘The Trojan Sofa’, where a furniture dealer delivers
sofas to affluent customers with his small son concealed in the
frame, to enable burglary when the purchaser has gone to work.
Before we did it for the first time my Da
said to me, ‘It’s up to yourself. You can say yea
or nay. I’d never force anybody to do something like this
- never mind one of my own. But I must say it is for Ireland.’
The comic high concept doesn’t interfere with
the pace of the drama or the underlying angle of real history.
If the book was an album, this would be the catchy single.
As the title suggests, death and the awareness of
death is everywhere in these stories (I’d call it a concept
album, if that metaphor hadn’t already been stretched too
far), from a woman who exacts the death penalty for a rape, to
the gentler account of two boys whose parents have died, taken
in by a childless couple. It is this story, ‘Learning to
Dance’, which shows MacLaverty at his subtle best: beginning
with apparently unexceptional characters, by the end a simple
scene of a couple dancing becomes strikingly moving:
They moved as one person, their legs scissoring
together to the music. They had variations - sometimes dancing
side by side - sometimes swinging out away from each other and
slingshotting back together again. She threw back her head and
her red hair fell and swayed. The doctor’s back was straight,
his chin elegantly proud. The boy felt as if he was watching
his parents. If they didn’t dance like this - and he had
never seen them dance at home because they had rugs on the floor
and the room was too small - it is how they would have wanted
to dance.
The collection is a quietly ostentatious display
of different modes of writing. MacLaverty’s facility for
comedy - rarely enough seen in his novels - makes welcome appearances,
even in the grim and death-aware surroundings of a hospital waiting
room (’The Clinic’):
Inside the men’s lavatory was a poster
about ‘impotence’. A man sitting on a park bench
with his head in his hands. How did he discover his condition
in a public park?
There is political drama in ‘A Trusted Neighbour’,
and a remarkably successful historical narrative in ‘The
Wedding Ring’. All in all Matters of Life and Death has
that rare quality in a collection of stories: not only is it not
a chore to finish it, but it’s a struggle not to carry on
reading it through, like a novel, and there are few weak links.
It closes with a coda set in a blizzard in Iowa, and the penultimate
story ‘Visiting Takabuti’ (Belfast schoolchildren
of recent decades will recognise the Egyptian mummy in the Ulster
Museum, who makes a guest appearance) again makes a narrative
of beautiful serenity from unpromising beginnings. The central
character seems a by-numbers old maidish character, unmarried
and full of regrets, William Trevor on an off-day, but the story
in the end gives us one of the most elegant and affecting treatments
of death in the whole collection. MacLaverty, MacLaverty, there’s
no one like MacLaverty. Who else can bring the lightest touch
to such impressive gravity?
And Nora imagines it happening at her own
death. She sees it like cinema. The soul, in her own image,
leans over and with tenderness kisses the empty body. Adieu.
And each time the soul makes the journey to the doorway reluctance
takes hold and it returns to kiss the body with its shrunken
frame and its frail bones of honeycomb. Adieu. Three times in
all. From one vital part of herself to another. Adieu.
John
Self
To read more of John Self's book reviews, check
out his blog at
The Asylum.
