Composing hymns to the quotidian to make heroes of the humblest

‘EVERYTHING happens on the street where we live,” said Billy O’Callaghan in a newspaper interview last year. And there he distils the essence of his fourth anthology, his own words as good as any. Whether the setting is Cork or Paris, a quiet backstreet or a screaming Atlantic storm, a Spanish bar or a Douglas mill factory, it is in the infinitesimal details that we find the very stuff of him.

O’Callaghan is a composer of hymns to the quotidian, to what Patrick Kavanagh identified as “the habitual, the banal” and his leitmotif of human loss and grieving makes epics out of the

unspoken, the barely said, the half-hinted at, the wordless nod.

There are ghosts in these pages, many of them children; in the title story, a fisherman is forced to dig the grave of his little daughter. “Beth has cleaved us entirely open in her going,” observes the unnamed protagonist, later intimating “there is nothing I can do but stand and watch while others around me struggle to stay afloat and while my betters sink and drown.”

In A Death in the Family, a beloved 12-year-old brother dies a slow and painful death after an accident. One of the most poignant passages in this collection is here, when the bishop arrives at the family home to give Confirmation to the dying boy. The bishop’s head is “laden with jowls and with the fist of a face buried like a punch in its very centre”. Expectations are teased, as what unfolds is not what you’d foresee, but rather a back-and-forth between bishop and boy that reduced this reader to tears. “Time passes but doesn’t get far,” O’Callaghan writes. Never a truer word.

In a very different story,

Ruins, similar in theme to his novel My Coney Island Baby, two long-distance lovers of many years spend a week together on the Beara Peninsula, but one of them is returning to her infirm husband in Taiwan. A mock wedding among ancient ruins is enacted to offer them some kind of comfort, but it only serves to underscore the gulf — and the half a planet — between them.

“The heart wants what it wants, but will often learn to settle for what it can get.”

This sums up the long-term marriage, built on compromise rather than love, described in the small pastoral symphony of the story Wildflowers, while in the oppressive midday Spanish heat, similar ideas are explored in Segovia. A lone woman tourist, not yet middle-aged, is approached by a much older Spanish man. She replies to questions about marital status and children with: “People are more than these definitions. You’re looking in the wrong place, if you’re hoping to see who someone really is.”

This is O’Callaghan’s quest, to reveal who his characters really are, especially when they’re burdened with life’s cruelties. And in chronicling the bravery sometimes required in simply putting one foot in front of the other, he makes heroes of the humblest of us.