SHORT STORIES

After a Dance by Bridget O’connor (Picador) Reviewer: Donal O’donoghue

When Bridget O’connor died in 2010 aged 49, a rare literary talent was taken in her prime. The Londoner (of Irish stock, not surprisingly given that name) would posthumously win (with her husband, Peter Straughan) a BAFTA for Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy but she had already established herself as a unique talent with her brew of strange and beguiling short stories. The 15 yarns in this anthology, selected from two previous collections, and including the award-winning ‘ The Harp’ (a clear- eyed unsentimental yarn of a grifter working the streets of London), showcase her ability to peel under the skin of the everyday and expose its guts. You are forced to look, and think, anew, as O’connor wields her literary tools with clinical precision and cuts to the bone.

Some of the stories are brutally short (‘ The Harp’ and ‘Kissing Time’ are barely six pages), but to paraphrase a line from ‘Plastered’, a disturbing story about an unloved man, there are few better than O’connor at cutting a long story short. And while she seems to do odd things with the form – ‘Love Jobs’ is a Best Man’s story like few other, while ‘Heavy Petting’s doomed goldfish, Godfrey, is a death-row pet that contains multitudes – but the choppy dialogue, topsy-turvy prose and oddball imagery (“a head like a kids fight” had me scratching my noggin, wondering if I was reading a typo) works against the odds if only because of the narrative’s driving belief in itself and those lives on the fringes it animates so weirdly and wonderfully.