In his third short-story collection, Blindboy Boatclub – one half of Ireland’s self-styled “dole-queue dadaists”, the comedy hip-hop duo the Rubberbandits – blends the ordinary and the bizarre, the hilarious and the desperate. The tone is set in the first story, The Donkey: “There’s a donkey selling Christmas trees off the roundabout. Looking like a prick in the frost with a green elf’s hat on its head.” The beast is weeping blood from the cruel abuse it is suffering at the hands of a child, and in a nearby nursing home the head of the narrator’s father is rotting, “full of dirty knots that threw terrors at him”.
Powered by immense, perverse energy out of the Limerick idiom, the collection generates a singular music that is memorable, unsettling and humane. Moments of beauty dazzle amid the profanity, as pathos and comedy are braided together.
St Augustine’s Suntan is set in a derelict cathedral that stands for several kinds of ruin: of the historical past and societal present, and of a broken and tormented mind. The narrator repeats the refrain: “I want to tear the thoughts from the inside of my head and throw them splattered in a hedgerow ditch for the weasels to eat.” There is a sardonic review of a variety of psychotherapies, all of which prove useless in escaping the past: “Before confession, before Christ, before psychology, we had trepanation.” Ruminating on the myth of the goddess Morrígan, who took the form of various glossy-eyed corvids, and with the bait of a petrol station sausage roll on his head, the narrator tempts a jackdaw to perform the operation, drilling into his skull with its beak. The old gods are gone, Christ has departed, therapy does not work, and we are left with the mystery and persistence of human suffering.
It could be argued that these are not short stories but tales, part of an oral tradition of storytelling rather than a literary one, but the distinction is certainly not so sharp in Irish life or literature. The pub story, the standup joke of the shaggy-dog variety and the comic-dramatic monologue can all be discerned here. There is a risk with this approach that rather than rewarding rereading, these tales might exhaust themselves in a single pyrotechnic performance, but that is not the case.
The Poitín Maker is an attractively old-fashioned kind of tale, set in a world where fairy folk are real, and feared more than the landlord and the revenue man – they could take your home and your money, but a fairy could steal your child. Some might find sentences such as “The mountains and the heather were only a rumour in the blackness” hackneyed, even kitsch, but woven together they make for atmospheric and compelling storytelling.
In I’ll Give You Barcelona, Jacky Kinsella, a weightlifting taxi driver and failed Everton try-out, gives the reader a tour of modern masculinity, encompassing cheetahs, near-death by podcast, and a close encounter with his alpha male competitor, Purple Brosnan. It’s simultaneously funny, disgusting and moving, and not readily quotable in a family newspaper.
Topographia Hibernica borrows the title of the work of 12th-century Norman propagandist Gerald of Wales, who sold an attractive portrait of the lands and nature of Ireland to prospective English colonists, combined with gross calumnies against the morality and capacities of the natives. The author takes fictional revenge on Gerald by portraying him as a priapic sexual fantasist, tormented by the mysteries of the Irish mentality, and by his bowel-blocking appetite for roast hedgehog. “‘Expunge, expunge, expunge, damn you,’ Giraldus said to his own arse. Immersed in its silent soliloquy, a moment as fleeting as the Wicklow winds, as from him descended a dark, firm relic, settling into the sands of Éireann, stories entwined. Rabbit-formed. A pebble of dung, wretched in its ambition.” This may be a commentary on the legacy of English colonialism, or an expression of the author’s delight in the scatological, or both, but is a memorable closer to this entertaining collection.
• Topographia Hibernica by Blindboy Boatclub is published by Coronet (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
