Simple snapshots of love, loss and longing

James Lawless
Published in Sunday Independent 22/06/2014

Waiting for the Bullet, Madeleine D’Arcy, Doire Press €12

Madeleine D’Arcy’s stories begin in medias res as good short stories should — ‘Fintan can smell warm chips as he enters the pub’ kickstarts the story Is This Like Scotland?

Notwithstanding a few clichés such as the predictable portrait of the elderly lady in Savage or the author’s fondness for the words weakly’ and weary’ or describing green fields as a patchwork quilt’, there lies herein a wonderful laconic telling of things: I never gave Terence a hard time for being straight, did I?’ contains in one sentence a multitude of intimations in the story A Good Funeral.

D’Arcy can write adeptly in either gender or in a different nationality — the American in Across the Duck Pond is convincingly drawn.

The prose is simple, realistic, but never pedestrian, engrossing and page-turning. We are left for the most part with pure story, easy to read clicking in the high emotions of love, loss and longing, yet hinting of deeper mysteries in our psyches in the passing reference to animals in The Fox and the Placenta or a swan in Across the Duck Pond. However, the reader could sometimes be disappointed reading these slices of life, engrossing as they may be, for their lack in the main of any lyrical description characteristic of some of the best short stories.

D’Arcy creates a sense of immediacy in her frequent use of the present tense and first person narrative which can be a bit overdone.

She is very good on locating telling details, such as the twine for carrying a parcel in Esmé’s Weekend or Fergus’s habit of rubbing the insides of Esmé palm with his thumb.

Toy guns, virtual pheasants on iPhones and dependence on mobiles all feature — she uses texting to brilliant effect to build up the marital tensions in The Wolf Note.

There is an occasional lapse in argot: Would Swedish Annika have really uttered the nuanced, She could have grown the tea by now,’ when commenting on a tardy waitress, while in another breath, albeit to humorous effect, she refers to Gougane Barra as Google Barry?

But D’Arcy knows her terrain well as she refers to the uneven felling of Coillte forests reminding Fintan of a bad haircut’.

The title story, about a toy gun which husband Turlough childishly brings home is the best. His wife turns the gun into something sinister at a party which has the effect of transporting her husband from his childish pranks into a terrifying adult realisation after a game of faux-Russian roulette.

It’s only a bit of fun,’ says Turlough of the realistic noise the toy gun makes when fired.

Despite this utterance becoming a bit tautological, the gun’s resonance, especially in the northern Ireland context, makes this a story worthy of Chekhov.

It is an epiphanic moment for the husband but also for the wife as she decides to keep the gun, knowing that as he weeps joined to her in bed, it endows her with emotional power over him.

These stories of ordinary human lives are so absorbing that one wants them to continue beyond the page, and feels a sense of loss when they jolt to their abrupt endings.

James Lawless’ latest novel is Knowing Women

Sunday Independent
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