The Granta Book of the Irish Short Story

The Granta Book of the Irish Short Story, edited and with an introduction by Anne Enright, Granta RRP£25, 480 pages

Short stories, Anne Enright remarks in her arresting and scattershot introduction to this collection, “are the cats of literary form: beautiful but a little too self-contained for some people’s tastes”. Since she cannot see a generalisation without wanting to subvert and undercut it, the judgment doesn’t entirely hold water; indeed, it is contradicted by several of the pieces that she has chosen. But there is something in it all the same.

That self-containment appeals to many Irish short-story writers: some of the most distinguished (Frank O’Connor, Mary Lavin, Sean O’Faolain) more or less abjured novel-writing in order to perfect their chosen form. Others (Elizabeth Bowen, William Trevor, Colm Tóibín, Enright herself) move easily between the two. She also raises the question of what kind of society nurtures and responds to the short story rather than the novel: a generalisation that seemed to apply to Ireland up to the late 20th century, when Irish novelists hit the deck running. But the Irish short-story tradition sustains itself, and it is just that: a tradition.

At the same time, it has been reinvented and expanded over the last generation. A key moment in the process was Enright’s own first book, a collection called The Portable Virgin, which was the literary equivalent (as she says of John McGahern’s stories) of “a hand grenade rolled across the kitchen floor”. It is a great pity that she has expelled herself from this collection, which by concentrating on writers born in the 20th century, and including a good deal of very recent work, suggests interesting lines of development. This means excluding James Joyce, George Moore and James Stephens, alas, though their influence nonetheless looms large.

The canonical O’Connor, O’Faolain and Lavin are here, of course; but so are the current Tóibín, Claire Keegan, Keith Ridgeway. William Trevor is represented by the stand-out story from his latest collection, “The Dressmaker’s Child”, which demonstrates his command of the form and appropriately ends the book: it is hard to think of anything else when you have finished it.

That is the kind of effect left by the best short stories, and several of them are here. I read Patrick Boyle’s “Meles Vulgaris” many years ago and remembered it so vividly that images and phrases sprang out of these pages with absolute familiarity. In a brilliant sequence of jump-cuts, the disillusioned protagonist’s memories of countrymen brutally killing a badger savagely intrude on his wife’s attempts to re-ignite their tired marriage. “Night in Tunisia”, the title story of Neil Jordan’s debut collection, remains as sharp, stylish and haunting as when it won the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1976.

Elizabeth Bowen’s “Summer Night” opens windows into several parallel worlds: starting with a woman driving through the night to an assignation in wartime Ireland, a suitcase sliding around on the back seat, it expands effortlessly into a world of strange encounters, missed connections and subtle threats. Colum McCann’s “Everything in This Country Must” affirms its standing as a modern classic. There are less familiar chefs-d’oeuvre from Val Mulkerns, Clare Boylan, Eilis Ni Dhuibhne and Aidan Matthews.

But Enright is characteristically determined not to be predictable. O’Connor is not represented by the much-anthologised masterpiece “Guests of the Nation” but by a broken-backed ramble called “The Mad Lomasneys”, for which the editor professes a special affection since her youth. O’Faolain’s “The Trout” is a finely crafted but limited piece compared to his more expansive mode: I would have preferred another chance to read “The Man Who Invented Sin”, but Enright is firm about not having too many stories about priests (although nuns feature quite a bit, as seen by Edna O’Brien and Michael McLaverty, and so do priests’ mothers, scarifyingly delineated by Maeve Brennan and Tóibín). Maybe the restriction on priests also excluded Bryan McMahon’s “The Cat and the Cornfield”, which is a pity, and the poet John Montague’s “An Occasion of Sin”, from his marvellous collection of the same name. I would also have argued for something from Eoin MacNamee’s The Last of Deeds (1989), another breakthrough book, conjuring up the rough and gritty side of modern Irish life.

That life is present in several of these stories but so is a more traditional world of farmyards, bitter weather, tight-lipped repression, small snobberies and rural lives of quiet desperation lived at close quarters. (Mary Lavin’s “Lilacs” frames these themes into a story about a family business dealing in dung.) In her introduction, Enright wonders if all short stories are essentially about loneliness, before briskly deciding this may just be yet another instance of writerly “nonsense about themselves”. Certainly the best of these stories open up the immense distance between people, and end with a dawning realisation of impending loss. These feelings seem suddenly relevant on a national scale, and as Ireland faces years of national trauma, it is tempting to speculate how fiction will reflect the process. On the strength of this collection, one can at least hope that the revived short story may continue as one of the few expansionist inheritances of the dead Celtic Tiger. Certainly its elegiac form seems peculiarly appropriate.

Roy Foster is author of ‘Luck and the Irish: A Brief History of Change 1970-2000’ (Penguin)