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Short, intense and simply stunning
Sunday, October 05, 2008 Reviewed by Alec McAllister
Let’s Be Alone Together, Edited by Declan Meade, The Stinging Fly Press, €13

Picking through a collection of short stories can be a dispiriting exercise, panning pages of earnest grit to find a minuscule nugget worthy of a wordsmith. Happily, Declan Meade’s mix of established, emerging and new writers has produced a literary goldrush.

Let’s Be Alone Together (the title is borrowed from a Leonard Cohen song) acts as both invitation and challenge, reminding the reader of the unique characteristics of the form. Words must be chosen with meticulous care. Blemishes, unnoticed in a novel, crack into fault lines under the compression of a short story.

Equal demands are made of the reader. Where a novel may forgive a few pages of half-hearted attention, a short story requires a period of brief, but intense, commitment.

Meade has also served both writers and readers well with his sequencing which, while never jarring, prevents any lazy attempts to layer this collection with an overriding theme. Patter ns emerge and re-emerge, offering a sense of journey that provides the collection with a shifting pace and freshness that never sags.

The opening quintet share a focus on the nature of exile, whether imposed, as in Carson’s Trail by Jim O’Donoghue, or chosen, as in A Wonderful Indifference by Damien Doorley. The reader is then shown slices of modern Irish life - a night out in Belfast, a disastrous wedding and the subtle rhythms and undercurrents of a GAA club.

There follows an often disturbing but never ineffective sequence of stories that centre on damaged or damaging relationships between men and women. A Hare’s Nest by Helena Nolan is particularly moving in its portrayal of a couple trying to cope with the loss of their child. In the midst of this section, Almost a Fairy Tale, by the German writer Ingo Schulze, stands stark. Its four-page depiction of a life is a model of Borges-like economy.

Michael J Farrell’s Writer in Residence is reminiscent of Flann O’Brien in its better moments, but could perhaps have done with a little trimming. Evelyn Conlon’s protagonist in The Meaning of Missing seeks a way to rescue her self-esteem and confidence from the twin pressures of her husband’s complacency and her sister’s selfishness.

Perhaps the most technically assured and vivid piece is Brown Brick by James Lawless, a simply surreal blend of black humour, metaphor and gritty but exquisitely executed urban squalor, which for all its ingenuity never loses the soul of its story.

Surprisingly, the Booker Prize nominee William Wall’s Perfection Comes too Late is probably one of the weakest contributions. Sprinkled with already clichéd and dated cyber-speak, it is a somewhat trite attempt to contrast the protagonist’s real social inadequacies with his online persona.

With so many different styles of stories by writers of varying experience, it is difficult, perhaps even wrong, to select just one as a highlight.

However, D Gleeson’s fictional debut and closing story Daragh Maguire and the Black Blood does deserve special mention. Drawing from the oldest and deepest well of Irish story telling she peels back a gossamer-thin curtain on reality to bring us into the world of faeries, a world reflecting our own inner terrors.

If there is a single thread running through this collection, it is a simple one - quality. The book should not be read out of a sense of literary duty or a need to be up to date with the latest authors. Read it for one reason only. It is good, very good.

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