Maeve Binchy in Wonderland
Gene Kerrigan reviews Maeve Binchy's latest book, DUBLIN4.
Dublin 4, by Maeve Binchy, is pubblished by Ward River Press at £2.50.
Maeve Binchy's new book of short stories, Dublin 4, used to cost £2,87 1/2p - until Ray McSharry turned nice guy and took V A T off books - and now it costs £2.50. With four stories, this works out at 62 1/2p a shot - not a bad deal. Perrsonally, I'd go up a quid each for two of the stories, the other two would then work out at 25p a piece, which is about right.
The first and worst story is Dinner in Donnybrook, a meandering tale of how a woman who's been done wrong plans her revenge. Carmel is a bit dawny , though it's implicit that her life as a fully paid-up wife of a bank manager has sent her that way. Appenndage of an executive, that sort of thing. Husband Dermot is having an affair with assertive artist Ruth. Carmel plans dinner party, invites best friends and Ruth. Confrontation coming up.
Except it doesn't. The story ends before the dinner. Carmel has conncocted a hare-brained scheme of reevenge. Machiavellian, one might say - if one can conceive of a dawny Machiavelli.
There are a dozen characters poppping in and out of the story to help with the exposition.
"I think Mummy s a bit lonely," Bernadette said to Frank.
"I think Mother's coming out of herself a bit more, darling," Anna said to James.
"I think Carmel Murray is losing her marbles," said Ethel at breakfast.
That kind of thing. The story takes 80 pages to reach some kind of concluusion. And this depends on Ruth, who is anything but dawny , accepting two improbable coincidences. Sorry, defiinitely 25p material.
The second story Flat in Ringsend , concerns a young Limerick girl coming to work in Dublin. It's a slight tale with a Woman s Own feel to it, commplete with happy ending. Jo is unnhappy in her new flat, lonely, can't make friends. There's little feel for the city and the story could be set in Gallway, Belfast or Drumshanbo. Jo's prooblem is not the city - it's the fact that she's eighteen and alone. The happy ending consists of her making a date with a fella.
If the first story is careless and the second written with an automatic typewriter the other two are well craffted. Decision in Belfield has Pat disscovering she's pregnant. She knows what the response from the folks will be because a couple of years earlier big sister Cathy had the same problem and went through the old never darken my towel again scene with mum and dad and went to London. The scene is ripe for some penny ante preaching - and Binchy succumbs for a paragraph or two.
"They're so liberal, they say they're so liberal," she had scoffed. "They keep say ing they're in favour of gettting divorce introduced and they want contraceptives, and they want censorrship abolished, but they refuse to face facts. They want me to marry a man knowing it will ruin my life and ruin his life, and probably wreck the baby s life as well. What kind of liberal view is that?"
You might well ask. Thankfully Binchy doesn't ask it for long. She soon gets down to the job of describbing the inevitable cruelty and routine hypocrisy that ensues when people try to pummel real life into a shape deemanded by middle class circumstance.
Murmurs in Montrose (isn't this thematic thing being stretched a little?) finds alcoholic photographer Gerry Moore leaving a nursing home after six weeks on the dry. Can he keep off the stuff, can he pull back together the fine life that he and Emma and the kids once had? It starts out being about that - but the story is really about whether Emma can accept traagedy, maintain her own integrity and save herself from being pulled down by the man she loves and has shared a life with.
The two failures in this collection happen when Binchy roasts an old chestnut once again (Ringsend), or tries to make too elaborate a meal out of scarce ingredients (Donnybrook). The two successes result from attempts to use routine, believable stories to unncover the strains within and between people trying to make sense and order of a world where such qualities don't come naturally. •