Review - Dark Lies the Island, Kevin Barry

Short stories have a strong place in Irish writing, and many Irish authors of literary fiction have turned their hand to the genre.  Kevin Barry is a very fine addition to the list.  Dark Lies the Island is his second volume in this format and maintains a superb standard throughout, ranging from the touching, romantic and poignant through the humourous to the threatening.  There are hints of an older more traditional Ireland, but the overall tone is very much one of an Ireland overtaken by new values, promulgated by a range of dystopian subcultures. And even where rural Ireland is portrayed, it is a sinister, off-kilter rural Ireland rather than the bucolic ideal of the past.

Barry writes beautifully, and has the knack of being able to portray the essence of a character in a few short sentences or paragraphs.  It is in the nature of the short story that we have to grasp the characters quickly and this is where Dark Lies the Island is particularly successful.  Some of these characters and their experiences will live in my memory even if their names quickly fade  I read this book quickly, but I find that I want to go back immediately to read some of these stories again, to re-experience the emotions which they have stirred.

There are thirteen stories in total, ranging from six pages to just over twenty.  Most are set in Ireland, though a minority deal with the Irish abroad - a Real Ale Club from Liverpool takes a day trip to Llandudno, a young Irish writer spends a summer on the margins of Berlin Society and an IRA cell plan a bombing in Camden. 

Dark lies the Island opens on a wistful note with Across the Rooftops – the story of a kiss which may or may not happen, but in the end doesn’t go quite as planned.  Wifey Redux relates the narrative of a blissful marriage which has gradually deteriorated and the difficulty of a father coming to terms with the sexuality of his daughter – the tone is one of dark humour. Other stories deal with the darker side of human relationships – A Cruelty follows a day in the life of a young man with Autism Spectrum Disorder, while Ernestine and Kit are two elderly ladies with some very bad intentions.

Most of the characters here are inadequate in one way or another.  Barry writes about them with a degree of compassion while not shying away from highlighting their weaknesses and failures.
Overall, I loved this collection for its range and scope.  There is not a bad story here and more than a few great ones which will live long in the memory.  It deserves to be widely read.  Barry is a very talented writer with a very will received novel (City of Bohane) and two excellent collections of short stories who may well become a major figure in Irish Fiction in the years to come.  From the perspective of a collector, it would be worth picking up all of his books now and following him in the future.

Book of the Week - Will Self, Umbrella

I’ve had a busy couple of weeks, so there may be a few posts over the next week or so as I catch up with my blog.  First up is Will Self’s Booker longlisted novel, Umbrella.  I haven’t had a chance to read this and I suspect it will be very much an outsider for the prize, but Self is always an interesting writer if an uncompromising one.  I have had the pleasure of meeting him on more than one occasion, and once won a signed book which he offered as a prize (a story for another day).  He likes to parade his extensive vocabulary and loves walking and cycling (on his Brompton fold up bike).  Indeed, I recall him describing how he rode on one Brompton while carrying a second in a bag over his shoulder, something which he described as “bike on bike action”. 

Umbrella has a medical theme – encepahalitis letharigica and the use of L-dopa , and medical matters are something in which Self is interested (and the reason I won the book from him). For years he injected heroin and also took cocaine and amphetamines. He went to Oxford to read PPE, graduating with a third after spending much of his spare time "hanging out" with schizophrenic outpatients from a local hospital. There was a brief period of cold turkey in the 1980s but he continued to use until a spectacular fall from grace in 1997 when he was found snorting heroin on John Major's jet while covering the election campaign for the Guardian.  He now suffers from polycythaemia rubra vera, an uncommon and potentially serious blood disorder. 

 Like many of his books, Umbrella is unlikely to be an easy read.  Let me quote from the Guardian review – “400 pages of unbroken stream-of-consciousness dotted across three time frames, leaping jaggedly between four points of view, and with barely a paragraph break, let alone a chapter heading.”  You have been warned.  The cover also looks very unattractive.

"Recently having abandoned his RD Laing-influenced experiment in running a therapeutic community - the so-called Concept House in Willesden - maverick psychiatrist Zack Busner arrives at Friern Hospital, a vast Victorian mental asylum in North London, under a professional and a marital cloud. He has every intention of avoiding controversy, but then he encounters Audrey Dearth, a working-class girl from Fulham born in 1890 who has been immured in Friern for decades.

A socialist, a feminist and a munitions worker at the Woolwich Arsenal, Audrey fell victim to the encephalitis lethargica sleeping sickness epidemic at the end of the First World War and, like one of the subjects in Oliver Sacks' Awakenings, has been in a coma ever since. Realising that Audrey is just one of a number of post-encephalitics scattered throughout the asylum, Busner becomes involved in an attempt to bring them back to life - with wholly unforeseen consequences.

Is Audrey's diseased brain in its nightmarish compulsion a microcosm of the technological revolutions of the twentieth century? And if Audrey is ill at all - perhaps her illness is only modernity itself? And what of Audrey's two brothers, Stanley and Albert: at the time she fell ill, Stanley was missing presumed dead on the Western Front, while Albert was in charge of the Arsenal itself, a coming man in the Imperial Civil Service. Now, fifty years later, when Audrey awakes from her pathological swoon, which of the two is it who remains alive?

Radical in its conception, uncompromising in its style, Umbrella is Will Self's most extravagant and imaginative exercise in speculative fiction to date."