Edited by Kevin Barry
From Our Correspondent:
Read through the latest (Town & Country) in an afternoon, but couldn’t really say I enjoyed it.
Nearly didn’t even get past the Intro, which was the kind of hyperbolic, bombastic (half-baked?) twaddle that was hard to take (was it supposed to be irony? I couldn’t tell). No wonder neither the various stories nor the volume as a whole could live up to that. I blame the Editor, as he should have had some say in what went in and (I feel) should at least have tried for a little bit of variety instead of the unrelenting gloom and doom (dirty kitchen sink) stuff we got. I refuse to believe Irish short story writing is this bad (so maybe it WAS irony).
Two exceptions: ‘How I beat the devil’ (Paul Murray) was the only story I thought had any spark or wit about it and ‘Tigerbalm’ was readable (though borrowing heavily from a short story by Stanislaw Lem and from 1984, Matrix etc).
The others, I never got the feeling that the authors particularly cared for their characters, so of course, I didn’t either. If (like many) these are heavily based on personal experiences are they simply trying to establish their credential as proper artists because these stories prove they’ve suffered? Or can they only be accepted if they write about ‘real’ situations (‘real’ as in ‘Big Brother’)?
As you can probably guess from the above, I didn’t enjoy it and it gets a score of 2(good)/10 (actually less but I didn’t really add them up + Intro).