The Collected Stories of Benedict Kiely By Benedict Kiely

The Collected Stories of Benedict Kiely

By Benedict Kiely

(Methuen, £19.99)

As one of only five artists and writers currently honoured with election as a Saoi of Aosdana, Benedict Kiely’s reputation as one of Ireland’s grand old men of letters is nothing if not secure. However, as Colum McCann points out in his eloquent and laudatory introduction to this volume, ‘...a perverse monism sometimes remains, insisting that Kiely can be read if you’re white, Irish and over fifty. The truth is, of course, that Kiely should be read in Brixton, Mississippi, Neilstown, Johannesburg and points in between.’

As Kiely is now 81, it is timely that Metheun should gather together his four collections of short stories, and reissue them in one book. Thus we have here the entire contents of A Journey to the Seven Streams (1963), and A Ball of Malt and Madame Butterfly (1973), A Cow in the House (1978), and A Letter to Peachtree (1987), plus the 1977 novella Proxopera for good measure. 

While some of Kiely’s early stories do have a traditional structure, and follow realist patterns established by O’Connor, O’Flaherty and O’Faolain, for the most part his style is discursive and digressive, and could even be termed expressionist, in that he subordinates realism to inner vision. Sometimes the seemingly arbitrary intertwining of incidents, tales, snippets of conversation and fragments of memory can irritate, but more often than not the stories repay repeated readings, as the layers of narration are stripped back and revealed as the ebb and flow of a writer who likes travelling hopefully as much as he likes arriving. For Kiely is a master of technique, and therefore has full licence to play with conventional notions of beginning, middle and end. We trust Picasso’s Cubism because we know he can draw like Ingres, and what is fascinating about Kiely is the fluid mix of tradition with experimentation.

Like his younger advocate McCann, Kiely also transposes the national with the international, either through featuring the Irish abroad, or else people from unlikely corners of the globe washed up on these shores. So ‘A Ball of Malt and Madame Butterfly’ concerns a Japanese prostitute in Dublin, while ‘The White Wild Bronco’ could be described as Ireland’s first Wild West short story. Though written in the third person, ‘Through the Fields in Gloves’ has all the verbal tics of the central character, an old man who spray-paints young girls, while his wife sits at home, too fat to rise from her chair.

But it is the inclusion of Proxopera here that is the clincher. Weirdly prescient of the horrible events of August 15, 1998 in Kiely’s hometown of Omagh, it oscillates effortlessly between the first and third person in recounting the story of a retired schoolteacher forced by terrorists to run a proxy bomb into his local town. Far from hitching a ride on the coattails of yesterday’s headlines, this great anti-war fable should have been read, and should still be read, as a terrible warning. A flawless piece of writing, it is one more reason to celebrate this book.

First published in the Irish Independent

Pacazo By Roy Kesey

Pacazo 

By Roy Kesey

(Jonathan Cape, £12.99 stg, H/B)

A pacazo is ‘an uncommonly large iguana, native to the environs of Piura, NW Peru’. John Segovia is an uncommonly large, 35-year-old Californian historian living in Piura, NW Peru. It is 1997, and he went there four years ago for his doctoral research on Peruvian history, and the horrors of the conquistadors – there is a vague family myth that he might be descended from a settler with whom he shares a name – but has not yet completed. Something of an eternal postgrad slacker, he instead teaches English language at the town’s university, his position there more tenuous than tenured, his visa status problematic. Given his bulk, and apparent ugliness, he identifies with the titular reptile. However, as the word can also define ‘a petty, bitter, local god who hates fat pale pillaging strangers’, he is also repelled by it – not least because in his first year on campus one defecated on his head from the branch of a tree he was walking under on his way to work, and it took weeks before he smelled good enough again for his students to approach him. So, self-loathing is much in the air.

He has bigger problems, however, and greater reasons to hate himself. Ten months previously, his young wife, Pilar, has been raped, beaten and left for dead in the desert, dying of heatstroke later after wandering in the wrong direction. Segovia blames himself. So do his in-laws. And so he is left to care for their infant daughter, Mariangel, who was only four weeks old when the murder took place.   

The local police, venal and corrupt, have given up on the case, and so Segovia searches obsessively for clues and for his suspected perpetrator, a taxi driver. In his time off, he scours the desert where Pilar’s body was found, accumulating dubious ‘evidence’. Otherwise, he visits prostitute ‘Jenny’ occasionally, and gets into trouble continually picking on the wrong people in the street, dark young men he mistakes for the culprit.

When the floods of El Nino arrive, destroying his horde, it seems like a sign that it is time to move on. He begins socialising with his university colleagues again, even finding a new love in Karina. Then, when another woman who resembles his deceased wife is found raped and murdered in similar circumstances, and then two more, he goes into full maniacal mode again, even to the point of indulging in an episode of bodysnatching. The dénouement is disturbing, but not altogether surprising.

Written in the present tense, foremost among Kesey’s stylistic ticks are unsignposted time shifts between Segovia’s current surroundings and scenes from Peruvian history, usually occurring mid-sentence. This imbues the prose with a dream-like quality, but also casts Segovia as an unreliable narrator. So lost is he in his interior thoughts and reflections, he doesn’t always see clearly what is going on around him. In general, the writing is beautifully cadenced, recalling the arresting simplicity of William Carlos Williams. The novel is also good on depicting academic disillusionment (but under the weight of such personal tragedy, what field of professional endeavour would not appear somewhat vacuous?), and the quotidian hassles of expatriate life.

 Pacazo is Kesey’s first full-length novel, after a novella, Nothing In The World, a short story collection, All Over, and a travel guide to the Chinese city of Nanjing. At over 500 pages, it is longer than it needs to be, suggesting that maybe shorter forms suit him better. The repeated scenes of checking taxi license plates, and missing intercity buses, tend to tire fourth time around. Also, having set the story up with a noirish element, it does seem like cheating the reader to suspend the ‘investigation’ plot for most of the book. But, then again, given the quality of the writing, it would be a brave editor who would decide what to leave out. 

Besides, Pacazo isn’t really a whodunit at all. It is a study of overpowering grief, remorse and anger, and incidentally the bemusements of first-time fatherhood. On those terms, it deserves to be read, even if it does wear out its welcome.

First published in The Sunday Independent