David Park's penultimate novel, the masterful The Light of Amsterdam was short-listed for the 2014 International IMPAC Prize. That novel was indeed set in a very convincing Amsterdam, while his new collection of short stories range from his native Ireland to Spain and Scandinavia. However, you feel Park would just be as comfortable with an entire set of stories set in the wee North - indeed you could call him a provincial writer in the best sense. He has perfected a way of using un-showy language in an economically neat manner, not unlike his distinguished predecessor, the late Belfast writer, Brian Moore. There is a whiff of neat carpentry off the prose, a kind of tacit humility about the tone, a tentative feel about the narrative stance, that is beguiling, indeed refreshing.
Park's great imagination and quasi-cinematic approach can amplify a scenario to quite powerful effect. In the story The Painted Cave, the hapless Spaniard, Adolpho is haunted by the fall-out from entanglement with a Moroccan siren who once fatally lured him into her company on a bus to Tangiers. The man is in serious trouble, due to the drug trafficking exploits he got caught up with, and he has borrowed heavily from Irish gang leaders on the Costa del Sol. Hashish, sensual ardour and hallucinatory imaginings blend atmospherically into a balefully engrossing story. Park expertly evokes Adolpho's sense of grim desperation, as he dreams of fleeing the inevitable.
He will go to a city. Barcelona perhaps. But not because he has a brother there, a brother who works for a shipping company and whose embrace of respectability will prevent him offering anything much more than a bed for a couple of nights and a sermon about the need to get his act together.
The story Keeping Watch is more small-scale in its scope, set in the narrow streets of Belfast as an obsessive detective stalks the family home from which he has been barred. It seems slight, however, in comparison to the far stronger stories Boxing Day, Heatwave, Gecko, and Old Fool, which must surely number among the greatest short stories from these islands in recent times.
Skype is set on what appears to be an isolated island somewhere off Sweden or Norway, its protagonist a retired teacher and island native who was once married to a woman who came to live there from the mainland. The couple had a daughter, but like the mother, she too has left the island, as most of the young people inevitably do, following farewell nights that are in effect the Scandinavian versions of the `American Wake.' There is a ghostly suggestiveness or ambivalence about what happens in the story and it may take a moment or two for the penny to drop at the conclusion. In fact I wonder now did I get it right at all.
But, then again, that too can be part of the magic of David Park's narratives - he can make you stop and process what you have read in the course of quite a few of these taut, vivid and healthily unpredictable tales.
Paddy Kehoe
