Review - Dark Lies the Island

Title: Dark Lies the Island
Author: Kevin Barry

My daughter was in Ireland recently.  While she was there, she bought me this book as a souvenir.  She had not read it (though I think she heard the author read a bit of it?  Or something like that.)  But she knows I like to read, and that I like many forms of fiction, so she thought she'd give this a try.

Dark Lies the Island is a collection of short stories written by Irish author Kevin Barry.  With only a couple of exceptions, the stories take place in Ireland.  And even in those two stories set outside Ireland, the main character is Irish.

The title of the book is the title of one of the stories, but it serves very well as the title of this anthology.  Each story -- connected as it is to the island Ireland -- has a darkness about it.  There are no sunny, happy stories here.  Ireland itself is often not only the location, but also a participant in the stories.  It is harsh and rainy.  It is cold and blustery.  It is desolate and disconnected.  It is a place people want to escape from, and place into which people can escape.

Though the writing is dark, it is quite good.  The author of a short story -- much like the poet -- must set a mood and get his or her reader in the right mindset very quickly.  I could tell that Barry did exactly that several times.  A couple of examples will illustrate what I mean.

In "A Cruelty" I had read just one paragraph before I thought to myself "I wonder if anyone has ever written a story with the main character being xxxxxxxx?"  (Sorry, but the xxxxxxxx is a spoiler.)  And, you guessed it, though Barry had not yet said so, the main character of this story was, in fact xxxxxxxx.  With his initial few words, Barry already had me thinking of his character properly, even before making the character's true nature clear. The same sort of thing happens, in a very disturbing way, in "Ernestine and Kit."

One must realize, before one reads this book, that darkness and Irishness are part of every story.  While I think the Irishness is complete, the darkness is not.  No sunny, happy stories -- that's true, but there is something in every story on which we can hang some hope.  Not much, perhaps, but some.

Leah, thanks for the book.