Curfew and other stories by Sean O'Reilly, review by Pat Boran

The Other Northern Troubles

Curfew and Other Stories. Sean O'Reilly. Faber and Faber.

(Sunday Business Post, July 2000)

In 'A Charmer' the first of the eight stories that make up what appears to be Sean O'Reilly's debut collection, the young female narrator worries about the lack of sexual desire being shown by her new and strangely absent boyfriend Brendan, about becoming in his eyes 'too precious to be touched, grabbed, too pure to be loved'.

What makes the line, and the story, so striking, of course, is that it reminds us that there are troubles other than physical and psychological abuse at the centre of many relationships, and it then attempts to open doors into an equally dark but far less visited room in the fictional castle, the place of absence, loss and regret.

In a sense, it is this absence that O'Reilly is so good at catching, whether it be all the things that go unsaid or undone between friends and lovers, and not-quite lovers, or whether it be the refusal of the backdrop of the Northern Troubles to come sufficiently into the foreground of these stories and take some of the pressure off his characters.

Interestingly, the weakest story here, 'Rainbows at Midnight -- again about an unconsummated relationship in which things are not said, though the male narrator is, ironically, a writer -- suffers primarily because it relies on events in the 'outside world' for its electricity. The appearance of that writer character so early in the book, I must admit, also gave cause for concern.

Concern raised elsewhere, however, was for rather than about characters, and O'Reilly displays here an almost unerring talent for fashioning affecting portraits of even minor figures through the use of a telling detail or mere fragment of dialogue. In the opening story again, for instance, Brendan's friend Eddie is a recluse, spending most of his time up in his bedroom or wandering about the house in tired pyjamas. In fact, Eddie could very easily be a neo-gothic character, always behind a door, a cipher for the spoiled promise of the times, were it not for a chance remark from his mother Gertrude later on: 'Sure my man was the same,' she says, almost in passing. 'You wouldn't even know you lived in the same house as him.' And suddenly what might have been the convenient strangeness of Eddie's behaviour opens, if only briefly, onto a troubled family history.

Such vignettes and still-life portraits (one of the stories is in fact called 'Portraiture') populate these stories and in the best of them add layers of meaning and resonance, sketching a city which is both occupied and empty at the same time, and in which gangs of kids living on the edge of night, and the edge of the law (in 'Curfew'), all too plausibly over the course of the book make the transition to gangs of adults with altogether darker things on their minds.

In 'Skull Stick' we find ourselves briefly outside of the North, in a London of the unemployed and unemployable. Were it not for a sleeping girl with 20 rings in one ear (which seems to place it in the late nineties), this could be almost any generation of exiles and backpackers killing time in London since the late 70s. Until, that is, trouble rears its ugly head. That some kind of unspoken loyalty between the Irish characters prevents them from challenging each other about anti-social behaviour is the whole point here, how the tribal can suffocate relationships, whether between family or friends. That the story tags on an explanation of that loyalty reminds us that O'Reilly's is still a forming talent, but there's no doubt it is one of the most impressive and promising to emerge in Irish fiction in recent years.