The short story is seen as either a natural form, close to conversation, or an art like poetry, requiring great skill and restraint. But some poems are huge and some short stories are restless, just about contained. Some stories push at their own edges, trying to escape themselves.
In The Ways, the second story in Colin Barrett’s superb second collection, every sentence is as full and alive as a sentence can be, while managing to stay ordinary. A landline “mewls”, waking a girl from the “cosy rut” of her bed. As she comes downstairs, “she swatted each light switch as she passed, in order to feel less alone”. Every chosen word catches and enlarges the character of Pell, one of three siblings who try to nurture each other after the death of their parents. Pell is similar to the characters in Barrett’s first collection Young Skins, which concerned itself with the disenfranchised, the peripheral, the damaged and the lost, and won the Guardian first book award in 2014.
This collection extends Barrett’s range, but it has its share of damage, still. Two men are in wheelchairs; one character’s hands are stuck in a rictus that obliges him to drink from a straw. A stranger is “touched”, as people were said to be touched by the fairy folk; another man is, in a more modern way, in and out of a mental hospital. In some stories, the folkloric gives way to the contemporary right there on the page: an old-style bachelor is described as an “incel”, a herd of slightly mythic cattle is overseen by the owner’s drone.
One of the stories is set in Toronto, where Barrett has been based for some years, but as the title Homesickness may indicate, most are set in a version of the place where he grew up, County Mayo on the west coast of Ireland. (There is, perhaps, some added snow.) The characters live in small towns, they meet and sometimes fight in pubs, they drive bad cars: a Vectra, a Mondeo, a Toyota Hiace “with piebald panelling”. These can be engines of death and injury – one is the site of suicide – but they also offer temporary freedom and are traded and prized.
In its highest style, the work fits into a tradition that moves through Kevin Barry and Marina Carr back to the epic tales of old Ireland, a mode that shifted from the heroic into the mock-heroic in the work of Joyce and Flann O’Brien. Three brothers called the Alps, in the story of that name, are “shortish men with massive arses and brutally capable forearms”. A little bit grandiose, a little bit disgusting, their dialogue is rich, comical and full of grace notes. “How’s the form?” asks one. “The form remains legendary,” says the barman, and he might be referring to the story at hand.
In The Ways, however, this richness of texture makes for a style that is full and compressed, the way anger feels compressed. Pell’s younger brother has been in a scrap at school, and her older brother Nick remembers the feeling after a fight: “the rinsed muscles, the warm quiver of shot nerves”. Sorting the problem calls Nick away from his work in a hotel kitchen. Afterwards: “There had been a minute left of his smoke break and, with the sensation of tears boiling behind his eyes, he smoked that minute out.” Nothing large happens, apart from impossibility and decline. Suspended from school, Gerry plays a Nintendo game and is bored by the need to keep shooting things “in order to advance the plot”. What he loves is roaming the gorgeous game map. “You could, of course, shoot every living thing in the game, though Gerry refrained wherever possible.”
I don’t think it is too strong to say that Barrett’s work hit an inflection point in Irish culture. His first collection was published just two years before Ireland’s Waking the Feminists movement called out a seemingly unshiftable bias against women’s voices in the creative arts. It was a remarkable four years before the Repeal the Eighth campaign, which saw men of Barrett’s generation do feminist work to ensure abortion services to women within Ireland. To be a male writer in those years must have required a kind of double vision, a tally of what might be lost and what could be gained. This is more problematic in a tradition so interested in loss, and how men in particular deal with the hurt of dispossession.
A real writer (no small compliment, here) meets all this. He lets the changing moment sink in and settle, and inform what comes next. Pell is not the only woman in Homesickness who is properly and profoundly observed. Three other stories deal with the limits, the sweetness and the difficulty of female compassion. Eileen, who looks out for her friend Murt, who picks him up after a stay in hospital, who walks with him and tries to stabilise his day, is told to back off by his brother. “You have to take your boot off his throat”, he says, and many women readers will recognise the bewildering unfairness there, how Eileen’s body felt “like a heavy coat she had neglected to remove”. It is also typical of Barrett, that the brother may have a point.
A couple of stories are about writers, and all of them are, in some way, about writing, about the necessity and foolishness of one or another style as we circle what cannot be said. In each of Barrett’s styles, however, there is an utterness to his attention, a devotion to the lives of his characters, that shifts the work into some more lasting place. Barrett is already one of the leading writers of the Irish short story, which is to braggingly say, one of the leading writers of the short story anywhere. He means every word and regrets every word. He just kills it.
The Silver Coast, which is the most open, glancing and underplotted piece in the collection, is about four women talking after a funeral. “The world is full of unaccountable things, if you’re keeping track,” says one. “And who keeps track?” her daughter replies.
Who indeed.
• Homesickness by Colin Barrett is published by Vintage (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
