The centre-piece of Colum McCann’s latest book is the eponymous crime novella in 13 chapters, but the real highlight is the additional 38-page story Sh’khol, one of the most powerful and moving pieces of contemporary Irish fiction ever published.
The titular novella, Thirteen Ways of Looking - which opens the collection - painstakingly investigates the murder of the elderly NY-based lawyer J Mendelssohn, a kindly, once formidable legal eagle, the story of whose demise is told in thirteen chapters. There are 34 days of footage from each of the eight cameras in Mendelssohn’s building alone, not to speak of the cameras in the street outside the restaurant where the murder is plotted.
So, Mendelssohn dies from a single punch outside the regular New York eatery where he knows everybody. His son Elliot had joined him for lunch on the fateful day but he is so distracted by a legal dispute that he cpractically spends the entire meal at some distance from his chair, jabbering into his cell-phone.
This rather unsavoury son is something of a disappointment to his more cautious Lithuanian father, who spent part of his youth in Dublin in the 1940s. Mendelssohn senior is frail and acutely conscious of the indignities of ageing. He spends the hours leading up to his death musing upon the oddities of New York life in a Leopold Bloom-like stream of consciousness while mourning his Irish wife Eileen.
Like something Don DeLillo might have concocted, the story is fascinated by the ubiquity of cameras and their value to police work. There is a rather laboured comparison drawn between the work of a detective and the work of a poet, which paradigm does not convince.
Ultimately, in the novella, it was strange to be taken down a fictional route travelled years ago, surely, by Saul Bellow or the aforementioned DeLillo. This means one is not hearing the original fictional voice one is hearing very definitely in the story, Sh’khol, of which more anon. While admitting that I am not much of a fan of crime fiction – hands up - I must also declare that I hardly cared who killed Mendelssohn in the end.
There are three additional long-ish short stories collected in the new volume, the best by far of which is Sh’khol, in which a woman retreats to a remote cottage by the sea in the West of Ireland, along with her adopted son, Tomas. One doesn’t wish to spoil, but McCann depicts the ensuing tragedy and what appears to be the partial redemption or resolution of the piece with narrative tact and pace. The story adroitly weaves into its dynamism the selkie theme, used to similarly brilliant effect in the recent Irish animation feature, Song of The Sea. It is very important that creative works in film and prose continue to use Irish folk myths in such a constructive and intuitive fashion (and, no, Star Wars on Skellig doesn’t count at all.)
The relationship between mother and son is beautifully realised in Sh’khol which I urge you to read as soon as you can after finishing this review. The story is comparable in greatness with Colm Tóibín’s equally masterful short story or novella, A Long Winter. Both cover similar ground - aching loss, the sudden onset of grief displacing previous sadness - a gaping emptiness, a void that could drive you crazy.
Paddy Kehoe
