THE SERVANTS AND OTHER STRANGE STORIES: Maria C McCarthy admires this intriguing and varied collection by John O’Donoghue
The Servants and Other Strange Stories
John O’Donoghue
Tartarus Press, 2024
ISBN: 978-1-912586-55-4
Limited edition hardback, 283 pages, £45,
Ebook as epub and mobi files, £7.99
The mark of a good short story is when you get to the end, you go back to the beginning to read it again. I think of short stories as rich desserts; delicious, but you wouldn’t want to consume too many in one sitting. But maybe second helpings… I eked out John O’Donoghue’s stories at the rate of two a day, so as to indulge in them with good attention and great relish. With the shorter tales in The Servants and Other Strange Stories, I went straight back to the beginning, for second helpings.
The collection is in two parts, and comprises three novellas and six shorter stories. They vary in genre from an epistolary account of one woman’s experience of the Irish Famine, through ghostly tales, a private detective story that veers into the land of the Fairy Folk, and a futuristic tale, all with an Irish slant.
The book begins with “The Irish Short Story That Never Ends”. This tale packs a punch with its brevity, and references scenarios from classic Irish stories without directly mentioning them: James Joyce’s “The Dead”; William Trevor’s “The Ballroom of Romance”; Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn all come to mind. It’s a perfect preface to what follows.
“Bitter Chill” is a ghost story set in Keats House, where a modern-day museum attendant, who shows visitors around by day, takes his paramour, intending a night of passion on ‘a repro’ of Keats’ bed. Unlike the tourists, they are given an authentic experience when Keats materialises at the foot of the bed to tell a love story far different from the one we know. The contemporary lovers serve mainly as a framing device for Keats’ story, which is a recurring element in the book. “The Heart’s Needle’ is another example. The main narrative is a written eyewitness account, framed by a covering letter from another source, with both sent to another character, who features only as the recipient of a hand-delivered envelope containing both, and has no voice or action of his own. Within that story, as within “The Islanders”, the main character is incarcerated against his will, in a kind of fugue or drugged state. I wonder if these sequences are inspired by O’Donoghue’s experiences within the mental health system, as featured in his memoir, Sectioned: A Life Interrupted.
O’Donoghue displays great skill in establishing settings and set-ups in no more than a few sentences. He shows this in the opening of “Bitter Chill” and again in “Pictures at an Exhibition”. I read the latter with a hand on my heart and a tear in my eye. A woman walks through an exhibition where each picture captures an element of Irish migrants’ experience: ‘She guessed that this was the train from Holyhead to Euston, and that these were men like her father, coming over to work on the buildings.’ Like O’Donoghue, I am a child of Irish migrants, and his pen portraits of the paintings outline holidays ‘home’ to Ireland, the long train journeys from Holyhead to Euston that my own parents made in the 1940s and ’50s, and that their children made in reverse each summer. O’Donoghue captures the second-generation Irish experience in a few pages, with scenes from a lifetime, ending with a supernatural twist.
In “Refugees”, ten fairy folk seek asylum in an Irish town. What follows is a satire on Leprechaun folklore and the treatment of asylum seekers in a country where ‘ghost estates’ – housing developments abandoned during the recession of the late 2000s – sit on the outskirts of Irish towns. The ‘fugitive fairies’ are welcomed by some, feared by others, as they go on the run.
I recognised “The Spot in His Eye” from O’Donoghue’s first short story collection, The King From Over The Water, reviewed here. On reading the story again, I was struck by the outsiders that frame the tales within The Servants; they listen and watch from the sidelines, as well as being part of the action. In “The Spot in His Eye”, a son of Irish parents, raised in England, visits a writers’ circle in a small Irish town. In “The Islanders”, a second-generation Irish man is shipwrecked on an island believed to have been abandoned in the 1950s. There is a robot priest in “The Servants”, an outsider hoping for acceptance as the first ‘Revbot’ in the Catholic church of the future. Writers are outsiders; observers able to comment on what those inside situations may not be aware of. Children of Irish migrants are outsiders, too; my own experience is of neither feeling fully English when in England, nor fully Irish in Ireland.
John O’Donoghue’s collection contains stories within stories, and the longer, novella-length pieces allow us to travel a long way, sometimes hopping into the heads of several different characters, and running with them for a while, before leaping into another. This is particularly evident in the futuristic novella “The Servants”, a story worthy of Black Mirror, with shades of Asimov and Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose (there is a section headed ‘The Name of the Robot’).
O’Donoghue is skilled in genre-hopping in this collection, from the Irish noir detective thriller/ fairy folktale mash-up “The Heart’s Needle” to the epistolary form in “Letters from a Famine”, in which we read only one side of the correspondence between Maeve, moving from her Ireland home to England and back before and during the Famine, to her sister Kitty, who has emigrated to America.
I save my last words for the physical book, a handsome hardback with ribbon marker and slip cover. On removing this, I discovered a full colour, embossed reproduction of the cover. I detected only one typo in the entire book – it is the curse of a former editor of an indie press to notice such things. So many contemporary volumes, even by larger presses, read as if there has been little editorial input. This is not the case with this thing of beauty. At £45, this limited edition hardback may be beyond most readers’ means; read the ebook if you can’t afford it, or wait for the paperback, due in 2025.
Learning to be Irish, by Maria C. McCarthy is forthcoming from Siglum Publishing in 2025. www.medwaymaria.co.uk
Dec 2 2024
THE SERVANTS AND OTHER STRANGE STORIES
THE SERVANTS AND OTHER STRANGE STORIES: Maria C McCarthy admires this intriguing and varied collection by John O’Donoghue
The mark of a good short story is when you get to the end, you go back to the beginning to read it again. I think of short stories as rich desserts; delicious, but you wouldn’t want to consume too many in one sitting. But maybe second helpings… I eked out John O’Donoghue’s stories at the rate of two a day, so as to indulge in them with good attention and great relish. With the shorter tales in The Servants and Other Strange Stories, I went straight back to the beginning, for second helpings.
The collection is in two parts, and comprises three novellas and six shorter stories. They vary in genre from an epistolary account of one woman’s experience of the Irish Famine, through ghostly tales, a private detective story that veers into the land of the Fairy Folk, and a futuristic tale, all with an Irish slant.
The book begins with “The Irish Short Story That Never Ends”. This tale packs a punch with its brevity, and references scenarios from classic Irish stories without directly mentioning them: James Joyce’s “The Dead”; William Trevor’s “The Ballroom of Romance”; Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn all come to mind. It’s a perfect preface to what follows.
“Bitter Chill” is a ghost story set in Keats House, where a modern-day museum attendant, who shows visitors around by day, takes his paramour, intending a night of passion on ‘a repro’ of Keats’ bed. Unlike the tourists, they are given an authentic experience when Keats materialises at the foot of the bed to tell a love story far different from the one we know. The contemporary lovers serve mainly as a framing device for Keats’ story, which is a recurring element in the book. “The Heart’s Needle’ is another example. The main narrative is a written eyewitness account, framed by a covering letter from another source, with both sent to another character, who features only as the recipient of a hand-delivered envelope containing both, and has no voice or action of his own. Within that story, as within “The Islanders”, the main character is incarcerated against his will, in a kind of fugue or drugged state. I wonder if these sequences are inspired by O’Donoghue’s experiences within the mental health system, as featured in his memoir, Sectioned: A Life Interrupted.
O’Donoghue displays great skill in establishing settings and set-ups in no more than a few sentences. He shows this in the opening of “Bitter Chill” and again in “Pictures at an Exhibition”. I read the latter with a hand on my heart and a tear in my eye. A woman walks through an exhibition where each picture captures an element of Irish migrants’ experience: ‘She guessed that this was the train from Holyhead to Euston, and that these were men like her father, coming over to work on the buildings.’ Like O’Donoghue, I am a child of Irish migrants, and his pen portraits of the paintings outline holidays ‘home’ to Ireland, the long train journeys from Holyhead to Euston that my own parents made in the 1940s and ’50s, and that their children made in reverse each summer. O’Donoghue captures the second-generation Irish experience in a few pages, with scenes from a lifetime, ending with a supernatural twist.
In “Refugees”, ten fairy folk seek asylum in an Irish town. What follows is a satire on Leprechaun folklore and the treatment of asylum seekers in a country where ‘ghost estates’ – housing developments abandoned during the recession of the late 2000s – sit on the outskirts of Irish towns. The ‘fugitive fairies’ are welcomed by some, feared by others, as they go on the run.
I recognised “The Spot in His Eye” from O’Donoghue’s first short story collection, The King From Over The Water, reviewed here. On reading the story again, I was struck by the outsiders that frame the tales within The Servants; they listen and watch from the sidelines, as well as being part of the action. In “The Spot in His Eye”, a son of Irish parents, raised in England, visits a writers’ circle in a small Irish town. In “The Islanders”, a second-generation Irish man is shipwrecked on an island believed to have been abandoned in the 1950s. There is a robot priest in “The Servants”, an outsider hoping for acceptance as the first ‘Revbot’ in the Catholic church of the future. Writers are outsiders; observers able to comment on what those inside situations may not be aware of. Children of Irish migrants are outsiders, too; my own experience is of neither feeling fully English when in England, nor fully Irish in Ireland.
John O’Donoghue’s collection contains stories within stories, and the longer, novella-length pieces allow us to travel a long way, sometimes hopping into the heads of several different characters, and running with them for a while, before leaping into another. This is particularly evident in the futuristic novella “The Servants”, a story worthy of Black Mirror, with shades of Asimov and Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose (there is a section headed ‘The Name of the Robot’).
O’Donoghue is skilled in genre-hopping in this collection, from the Irish noir detective thriller/ fairy folktale mash-up “The Heart’s Needle” to the epistolary form in “Letters from a Famine”, in which we read only one side of the correspondence between Maeve, moving from her Ireland home to England and back before and during the Famine, to her sister Kitty, who has emigrated to America.
I save my last words for the physical book, a handsome hardback with ribbon marker and slip cover. On removing this, I discovered a full colour, embossed reproduction of the cover. I detected only one typo in the entire book – it is the curse of a former editor of an indie press to notice such things. So many contemporary volumes, even by larger presses, read as if there has been little editorial input. This is not the case with this thing of beauty. At £45, this limited edition hardback may be beyond most readers’ means; read the ebook if you can’t afford it, or wait for the paperback, due in 2025.
Learning to be Irish, by Maria C. McCarthy is forthcoming from Siglum Publishing in 2025. www.medwaymaria.co.uk