Before Brian Friel earned renown as a dramatist, he wrote short stories, many of which first appeared in the New Yorker. These were later published in two collections, A Saucer of Larks (1962) and The Gold in the Sea (1966). Now ten of the stories, selected by Friel before his death in 2015, along with three chosen by his widow, have been brought together in Stories of Ireland.
These are deeply rooted in the counties of Tyrone and Donegal. Friel blends actual locations with fictional ones, such as Ballybeg, the setting for several of his plays, and the splendidly named Mullaghduff. They are home to tightly knit rural communities, where an old woman ventures no further than 52 miles in her life, a boy, who has never seen a ‘coloured’ man, asks ‘Will he attack us?’, and all are in thrall to the parish priest.
The characters cling fiercely to every shred of respectability and status. In the opening story, ‘The Diviner’, a woman whose first husband’s antics made her ‘ashamed to lift her head’ during 25 years of marriage faces fresh humiliation when her second husband’s drunkenness is publicly exposed. In the darker ‘My Father and the Sergeant’, a priest convinces a man whose daughter has been molested by a teacher not to make a complaint, repeating the chilling: ‘No harm done. No harm done.’
Friel’s reputation as ‘the Irish Chekhov’ can only be enhanced by the collection. A major theme is the escape into fantasy. In the aptly named ‘The Illusionists’, a down-at-heel itinerant entertainer crushes a young boy’s illusions. Elsewhere, characters are at pains to shore them up.
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