The stories in Northern Irish writer Lucy Caldwell’s fourth collection are often devoted to family life, or a professional life in the arts: or both. They’re almost always about memory and how to manage it. They offer a certain continuity with her earlier collections, Multitudes, Intimacies and Openings, though it’s subtle and organic rather than directly narrative.
In All Grown Up, Luke returns to his childhood home, only to be steadily reabsorbed by it. He applies himself to clearing the house, putting it on the market; he thinks about all the possibilities he’ll have once he’s sold up. But the longer he stays the less impulse there is to leave, and the more he remembers, not just about his life here, but his life generally. Meanwhile he’s a 40-year-old divorcee with a bad back, incipient alcoholism and a child at boarding school, attempting to come to terms with divorce, the death of his mother and his sense of entrapment. A one-night stand with his ex-wife’s sister doesn’t help. As you read, that title cycles between bleak irony and an equally bleak optimism.
Hamlet, a Love Story is a title full of traps, too. In a New York dive bar after the run of a new play called Choose Your Own Hamlet is finished, Sonya the playwright somehow ends up with Callum, who isn’t even her type. She is willing to bet she isn’t his either. She has decided that the flaw in her play – in which Hamlet loops and replays the original text, desperately seeking “a way out of all that lies ahead” – is that Choose Your Own Ending texts don’t just encourage choice, they reward action. “Inaction was punished. Your only hope was to … seize the narrative.”
The Lady of the House seems like a classic ghost story, with a castle gatehouse, old books featuring “grey blooms of mould on the inner covers”, and a curse dating from 1660. Two sisters – one of them, the text will only ever address as “you”; the other is called “Lou” – seek commonalities when one visits the other’s partly renovated heritage home in Scotland. Ghosts of memory rise to match the ghost the unnamed sister encounters on her first night in the gatehouse guestroom. Lou, tired out and dully exasperated by childcare after seven years of IVF, miscarriages and financial hardships, admits that “the most random things have been surfacing lately – things you’d not even call proper memories … just stuff”. She’s not sure “what you’re supposed to do with it, with any of it”. The reader suspects she’ll manage it by moving resolutely forward. What the ghost wants is clearer, with some promise and more menace.
Caldwell’s characters display a quiet resilience. At the same time they are breakable. She depicts their lives at moments of spiritual and emotional loneliness, supported and simultaneously defeated by the anxious sense they have that life is important even when it can never be solved. Though overwhelmed by circumstance, they have the deeply bedded feeling that they are failing in a duty. In Little Lands the duty is to your own future: a shot-by-shot replay of the dance scene in The Sound of Music is paired with and critiqued by the real lives of Christopher Plummer and Julie Andrews, who, we’re told, fell in love during the filming of the dance and regretted never doing anything about it. While for the professional violinist of Harmony Hill, travelling alone by air with an instrument “older than the United States of America”, duty is what she owes to her talent and – especially – her teachers: obsession as stewardship. Duty to locality, and to memory and origins, reach their climax in All Grown Up when Luke recognises that if he’s not careful – if he doesn’t choose his own ending – his future can only be the past.
These stories are full of transformational delight in life and the spirit one moment, emotional and psychological threat the next. They’re considered enough to be savoured, one at a time, with an attention that responds to the intention of the author. We are each of us God, the harried, devoted mother of A Family Christmas thinks, “right out on the cutting edge, the universe seeking to know itself. We are an aperture, a point of light, through and by which things can be known.” Caldwell is surely speaking of the devotions of the writer here, of herself, and, especially, these kinds of stories.
One of the most attractive features of Devotions is its realism, explicit in the panoramic lists of objects in a scene, the sharpness of Caldwell’s eye, her capture of the moment. She talks of sleeping in “the taut stretched acres of an American hotel double, with rolling news on low for company”, and you’re instantly there. “A few scraps of sky,” she tells us elsewhere, “sheared themselves off and fell as snowflakes.” The tiny events like this, the places, the people, the relations between them, the things they say and the way they say them, all seem utterly observed. There isn’t another way to put it. It’s stimulating, frightening, quietly passionate and somehow comforting too. Never wrenched or overwrought, always an oblique yet perfectly human mix. If you want a window to look at the world through, it’s here.
• M John Harrison’s The End of Everything is published by Serpent’s Tail in June. Devotions by Lucy Caldwell is published by Faber (£14.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
