A Slanting of the Sun
by Donal Ryan (Black Swan Ireland, €10.99pb)
Anna Farmar
There’s a wistful longing in many of the stories in Donal Ryan’s third book A Slanting of the Sun – for kindness, for a sharing of love, for forgiveness – as the narrators remember the turning points when their lives went awry and they try to come to terms with the aftermath.
The author’s first novel, The Spinning Heart, was famously plucked from a slush pile after numerous rejections. He has since gone on to publish a second novel and now this fine collection of demanding short stories, five of which have already been published elsewhere. Most are set in an anchorless 21st Century rural Ireland, portraying lives on the edge of despair.
A young man drives too fast and kills his girlfriend, her family and his are traumatised by the accident; a woman is raped, her people take revenge; an old man is killed during a robbery, one of the gang tries to make amends.
All but one of the stories are told in the first person, in an unmistakeably Irish country cadence, the words running on and on: “… and he half dead that time and no son or daughter left to look after him and the auld wife long buried and he desperate stuck for the few pound to put himself up in the good home…”
The lives portrayed are bleak and lonely. In ‘Sky’ the one great love of a man’s life, his little nephew, is taken away from him, with careless cruelty. “I was always here waiting at the gate for Billy, for nights and weekends and weeks at a time”, but the child’s mother takes him to England and does not keep in touch.
The author’s great strength is his distinctive voice, the confiding, colloquial tone in which his characters draw us into their lives, demanding to be heard and hoping to be understood.
The guilty narrator of ‘Losers Weepers’ is struggling to keep his business afloat in the recession, presenting a brave face to the world. He lives in a housing estate where neighbours hardly know each other but bond a little in the search for a lost ring.
The twist in this story works well, relying on recognition of everyday human weakness, rather than the shock of extreme violence as in the less successful ‘Retirement Do’ and ‘Crouch End Introductions’.
There are real villains in these pages: the crooked businessman building houses that crumble; the care worker abusing her vulnerable clients; the psychopath on the look-out for a victim. But more convincing are the hapless characters struggling to make connections, to redeem their lives in a world bereft of the old certainties: “I knew the hollow centre of those things, the untruth of the Word that gave him such comfort…”
There is little comfort in Donal Ryan’s world, but in the end it is not without hope: the last word in the final story in the collection is “love”.
