Review
Proving once again that the art of the short story is alive and kicking, says Sean McMahon.
- Sharp Sticks, Driven Nails
- The Stinging Fly
On Edge
These twenty-two stories, a slight majority of them Irish, bristle like barbed wire as the title from Ecclesiastes 12:11 anticipates.
Many deal with what James Thurber delineates in his cartoon sequence ‘The War between Men and Woman’. None of the characters seems to be in a stable relationship from the couple in the first story ‘Waiting for the Bullet’ playing fake Russian roulette to the long-suffering Ashok, the taxi-driver in Christine Dwyer Hickey’s ‘The Yellow Handbag’ who maintains a cheerful mien in spite of having to live in his cab and being denied access to his daughter Sarla.
A man has an unsatisfactory meeting with a grown-up daughter he has never met; another falls again to drinking after a moment of possible recovery; a salutary episode of mild voyeurism gives another the strength to leave a dead-end job. The non-Irish ones, from Romania, New Zealand, USA, Russia, Serbia and Malaysia show the same sharp edginess, some quite violent as in Zakhar Prilepin’s account of fighting in Chechnya. All, as the editor suggests, appear unlaboured; the short story may be indeed be the literature of the morally dispossessed.
