The Boatman and Other Stories

It’s daunting to think that no matter how I review this exceptional collection of short stories by Billy O’Callaghan, I will never adequately express my full sentiments, for how to articulate that O’Callaghan is simply the best writer I’ve come across in ages? His short stories are a treatise on the human experience, the impressionable psyche, the vulnerable human heart. He crafts his stories with the fluidity of a wave that builds slowly, crests, then turns in on itself after enveloping sight and sight unseen. To read The Boatman and Other Stories is to read a master at his craft. You’ll be swept away by the rich detail and nuance of commonplace in the hands of this powerful storyteller. I cannot recommend this collection hardily enough. Read it, treasure it, then do as I did and put it in pride of place on your bookshelf.

In A Sense of Rain, one of the stories in THE BOATMAN AND OTHER STORIES, the Irish author Billy OCallaghan indulges in having a character have difficulty reading Faulkner:

Still Faulkner? Ellie said, watching me in the mirror. I looked up from the book.

Im persevering. Some pages, I think I can almost understand what Im reading.

A little later: The book lay tented open on my chest, and I picked it up, looked at the page number and tried to memorize it, knowing that without the number Id never find my place again. And thered be no question of me ever trying to start over. It was a slim book and I was already well into the second half, but I could only stay with it for so long. Already my strength was waning. To avoid despair, I stopped myself from analyzing or summarizing what Id so far read.

Thats a mighty remarkable thing for any writer to have done, and I have to say that I thoroughly enjoyed it.

I could call OCallaghans style understated, but I would have to add that its understatement is weighted in a way that can be moving or even devastating. This author manages both harshness and gentleness with perfect accuracy and ease, and his eloquence never seems reached for or strained. Hes able to take the simplest materials and spin them into memorable narratives.

Love Is Strange and Wildflowers should surely start showing up in the anthologies.

The narrator ofA Death in the Family, the final story in the collection, is a grandmother. In the last paragraph, speaking of her young grandson, she says, Were as close as clapped hands, he and I. What follows that and closes the book left me in tears and with the hair on my arms rising.

Twelve stories that will take you to Paris, to Spain, Taipei, and, of course, to Ireland, as well as taking you back and forth through time, examining such themes as grief, love, fear, choice, loss, heartbreak, consequences, along with the wonders, as well as the sometimes unexpected brutalities, of life.

These days, it seems that less-than-happy news is almost constant, so this quote from the title story, The Boatman really spoke to me.

As I age, I find myself favouring novels and stories that I know will end happily, not because that makes them more believable but because the very inverse of that is true, because their sense of reality softens and they again get to be something more than the world as it has shown itself to me. Not bad all the way to is core and rarely intentionally so, not without its beautiful moments, but neither naturally set up, it seems, for happy endings. Because in the end theres always death, and always broken hearts. Happy stories, at least, get to hold the air of magic.

And even though not all of these stories have happy endings, theres so much beauty in the way that OCallaghan shares them that, at least for me, they always hold that air of magic. A magic to soften the twists and turns of life, a beacon of light to remind us that we are not alone in our struggles and sorrows, that we are all small against the world.

Many thanks for the ARC provided by HarperCollinsPublishers / Harper Perrenial

It is a well-known fact that the Irish are supreme storytellers. Billy O’Callaghan lives up to this praise. I’ve often noted that a book of well written collection, featuring well crafted stories without a clinker in the bunch, is more taxing for a reader than a novel of similar length. Such is The Boatman. Twelve stories delving into the human heart, each of which demands attention and immersion, to be nipped at over a period of days and not devoured in one sitting. Can’t be done. Each features a person sometimes at a crossroads which is a usual trope, but in many there is a look backward at a life that directed them there. The final sentence of “Wildflowers” sums this up: “He could tell himself, and believe, that he was who he’d always been, in one breath an old man, in the next still very much a boy, and he kept his losses close because time’s barriers were soft.” An old woman remembers a lost brother, a woman fleeing something unexplained in a hot, Spanish city, doomed lovers — there is not a clichd character in the mix. And the story from which the collection gets its title required for me a fistful of Kleenex. Highly recommended.

Great book to read great stories based on real people and how life was in early 1900s in ireland.

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