Review
Groundbreaking stuff, says an impressed VI Whitehead
- The Pleasant Light Of Day
- Penguin
Lit Up
The writing in this collection both shocks and delights.
Philip Ó Ceallaigh, who won critical acclaim with his first collection, believes in facing the facts and making his readers face them with him. At times his unrelenting focus on the detritus, clamour, and futility of the modern world threatens to overwhelm - until the lucid clarity of the writing and the occasional glimmer of hope shines through the darkness.
In The Pleasant Light of Day a man, with infinite tenderness, conducts his five year old son round the Egyptian Museum of Antiquities in Cairo. The relationship between father and son is sketched with the lightest touch. The boy is protected from the dead bodies in the museum, he is allowed to rest before going for an ice-cream after an hour spent walking round the exhibits. There is an atmosphere of calm and wonder as the father sees things through his son’s eyes. Even the mother resting at the hotel is presented sympathetically.
In A Time for Everything the acknowledgement of new life is a counterpoint to a backdrop of brutality and ignorance. Conception is described in this story from the woman’s viewpoint – as something that is meant to be. In other stories sex is brutal and animal, an avoidance of intimacy rather than a coming together of two people. Alcohol, sex, noise and pollution are things to escape from. Being alone at the edge of civilisation is the goal to strive for. Even that fails as the waste of civilisation litters the desert and washes up on the shoreline.
The monk in Tombstone Blues contrasts with the narrator. Shishoy has attained happiness. The monastery is not a place of ‘silence, exile, self-punishment, denial…’ To the monks it is a place of stillness. When the narrator finds a bottle of whiskey in his room and sees a ‘long limbed blond woman’ being showed to the guest rooms he abandons contemplation and reverts to form. Nadine brings the world of liposuction, ex-husbands and anal sex to the place where the virgin smiled beatifically. In the morning he says goodbye. The only note of hope is the parting gift of a cross that Shishoy gives him – a fragile link to an alternative life.
This is a beautifully written book, full of twists and turns. The descriptions of urban decay and the starkness of the wilderness are breathtaking. The language is spare but the references are dense and a feeling of being near the edge of civilisation and sanity permeates the text. Character and relationships are caught in a few vivid strokes. Some stories are linked by characters or places as if a whole world is described. I look forward to Philip Ó Ceallaigh’s next work with anticipation and some trepidation. He breaks new ground and challenges familiar concepts of what the short story can achieve.
