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PRINT Holly Gash Diarmuid McGreal DeBhairduin’s t
ales function within an uncanny world of ghostly realism. The Stranger’s House: Writing Northern Ireland Alexander Poots [Twelve] How best to inhabit a shifting landscape? From terrain scarred by division and conflict, the writer seeks to claim new ground. In the north of the last century, the problem presented with especial urgency, as we learn in this excellent survey of its writing. For many, the answer was exile, with all of the vexed critical distance it affords. The title is taken from The Stranger’s Home for Asiatics, Africans and South Sea Islanders, an institution the poet Tom Paulin encountered while astray on the streets of London, a city he had long considered, being of Loyalist stock, as his birthright. For CS Lewis, a creative breakthrough occurred initially at Oxford, and culminated in the imaginative exile of Narnia, a place that had its source in ‘that part of Rostrevor which overlooked Carlingford Lough’. Poets like Heaney were best able to respond to the Troubles through the psychical excavation of iron-age sacrificial victims of the Nordic countries, while Derek Mahon broke ground, famously, in A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford. Novels such as Brian Moore’s Black Robe, with its setting in the New World of the seventeenth century, probed the conflict from afar; while in Milkman, Anna Burns was able to examine the suffocating, identity-obsessed Belfast of her youth only by excising all the names and dates. In all cases, Poots tells us, ‘an oblique approach was a response to that duty of care and nuance’. It is to his credit that he has discharged that same duty. DMG Twiggy Woman Oein DeBhairduin [Skein Press] If the recent successes of ‘Seanchoíce’ (an Ireland-based storytelling night that continuously sells out in seconds — for those not in the know) is anything to go by, the act of storytelling is having a revival… or perhaps it never really went away. Far from a dying art, we are witnessing the modernisation of the oral tradition, and Oein DeBhairduin’s collection, Twiggy Woman, is no exception. Beautifully and spookily illustrated by Helena Grimes, DeBhairduin’s collection of eerie folktales weaves ‘threads of connection between our mundane outer lives and our deep inner world’. From eyes appearing in bathtubs, to hungry grass and boots with a mind of their own, DeBhairduin’s tales function within an uncanny world of ghostly realism, constantly reminding us of the overlap between what is ‘real and surreal’ and our attempts at ‘command over both’. Often these tales seem to function more as parables than ghost stories, bringing with them ‘slivers of wisdom about how to engage with the unexpected’. In Lantern, DeBhairduin shares these cautionary words – ‘The living, if unrelenting in their grief, can hold the dead on the threshold and twist them into something unnatural,’ and in Hungry Grass we are reminded that ‘a well-fed friend, living or dead, is better than a hungry one’. My personal favourite lesson is shared in Wisht – ‘having a voice… is a thing to protect’. With these warnings DeBhairduin is reminding us that, far from silly superstitions, heeding these tales is wise if we want to keep the ghosts at bay… even if we tell ourselves we don’t believe in ghosts. There is a slight contradiction within this collection between the written and the oral. Storytelling, particularly in Ireland, is inherently tied to the act of speaking aloud, some old stories are even forbidden from being put to paper. It is tempting to question whether DeBhairduin’s written folktales can really embody the same essence as those spoken around a campfire. However, it is clear that DeBhairduin has succeeded in lifting his stories from the page. What really stands out is the pepper52 ing of forgotten Irish phrases – ‘Shade-ogs’ describing Gardai, for example: even some internet digging only reaches as far as ‘Shades’ – relating to the Irish for whistle. These words enhance the stories, imbuing them with a sense of legitimacy and history. DeBhairduin’s preambles before each tale also act in the same way, grounding each story in personal experience and allowing DeBhairduin to truly embody the role of storyteller. But it is DeBhairduin’s prose style that really cements this collection with an ‘essence of oral storytelling’. He has a knack for rhythmic descriptions that are almost lyrical and certainly poetic; two sisters are described as ‘close like a shoe and a sock’ and a story settles in a child’s imagination ‘faster than the turn of a key and heavier than a set of locks’. Twiggy Woman is a collection that earns its place in the Irish folktale tradition and will undoubtedly settle in the imagination also. HG