Bernard MacLaverty's 'Blank Pages'

Last May I wrote about the marvellous ‘masterclass’ book by George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, in which he analysed three short stories by Chekhov, two by Tolstoy and one each by Turgenev and Gogol. 

To repeat my words then, 

Perhaps his key word is ‘escalation’, and he is brilliantly perceptive in showing those micro-moments when a story ‘escalates’, moves forward, in some way, especially if this is not obvious. There are two other key ‘e’ words: efficiency and expectation. Stories need to be ruthlessly efficient, never including anything extraneous (there you go again) to their purposes, and they need to deal with a Goldilocks level of expectation: when imagining what comes next in Chekhov’s ‘In the Cart’, what developments would disappoint us as being too obvious, or too absurd? The story needs just the right level of expectation-fulfilment:

In his comments on Chekhov’s ‘In the Cart’ Saunders wrote:

Years ago, on the phone with Bill Buford, then fiction editor of The New Yorker, enduring a series of painful edits, feeling a little insecure, I went fishing for a compliment: “But what do you like about the story?” I whined. There was a long pause at the other end. And Bill said this: “Well, I read a line. And I like it . . . enough to read the next.”

And that was it: his entire short story aesthetic and presumably that of the magazine. And it’s perfect. A story is a linear-temporal phenomenon. It proceeds, and charms us (or doesn’t), a line at a time. We have to keep being pulled into a story in order for it to do anything to us.

On all these fronts the veteran Irish writer Bernard MacLaverty succeeds in a deeply pleasing way in his new book of short stories, the cheekily-titled Blank Pages (they’re not blank at all: they’re richly patterned, deeply resonant, highly skilful). MacLaverty no longer sends stories out to periodicals for publication (read Martin Doyle’s interview here): these have all built up until the book was fully ready, and then were launched, fresh and marvellous, into publication. Sometimes I lose attention when reading a collection, the format of which necessarily lacks the narrative coherence of most novels, but not here: story after story compels you to relish it through to its natural ending, and then to start the next.

What are MacLaverty’s strengths in the not-so-blank pages? For a start, total confidence in and control of a style whose base-line is simplicity, but which never lapses into banality. Here is the first paragraph of the book, the opening to ‘A Love Picture’:

She set the egg in its eggcup. No sooner had she sat down than she had to get up and go to the kitchen for a spoon. There was a step down, which she took in her stride. The small apostle spoon she used for eating an egg from its shell was in the cutlery drawer and she rattled around until she found it.

Even in this plainness things stick and suggest: that apostle spoon, her taking in her stride the single step down. And certainly not every paragraph is as plain: MacLaverty is not Hemingway. In ‘Wandering’ (one of two stories dealing with adult children’s relationships with their dementia-stricken parents), the teacher-narrator discovers that insects have crowded into her house, the door having been left open by her wandering mother, and the paragraph delights us with its concluding similes:

The front door was wide to the wall and the place filled with summer insects. Jesus! Ten, twenty daddy-long-legs, tipping the ceiling, colliding crazily with everything. They made a tiny noise, wing-tippings, flutterings, dry paper noises. Their legs were long, making them seem clumsy - like creatures burdened with ironing boards or deckchairs.

More strengths: he is superb on place, and on time. Four of the stories have historical and location sub-titles: ‘A Love Picture: Belfast 1940’, ‘Searching: Belfast 1971’, ‘The End of Days: Vienna 1918’ and ‘Blackthorns: County Derry 1942’, and all these stories are precise and memorable in historical detail. The poignant ‘The End of Days’ re-imagines the story of the artist Egon Schiele tending to his dying wife Edi in the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918, and comes home all too sharply now following our own recent experiences. A disc of light coming through a keyhole is 

About the size of a korona or a small silver coin, perfectly bright. 

Appallingly, Schiele is just 28 when he dies, Edi 25. But even amidst this horror, there is something redemptive in the art Schiele creates in the sealed-off apartment, with only one possible subject. 

Another telling detail: in the title story, the widowed narrator returns to his house having had his cat unexpectedly euthanised by the vet:

He opened the door and set the empty cat basket in the hallway.

No more than that, no over-egging the idea. And while this story, like several others, is about someone at a fragile moment of life, beset by images of mortality, this is not a depressing collection. In ‘Sounds and Sweet Airs’, an elderly couple on a ferry from Ireland to Scotland encounter a young musician who has been visiting her father, severely disabled by a fall from scaffolding.  She always brings her harp on her visits to see him:

When he says listening to me playing makes him forget his condition for while - how could I not?

The couple encourage her to play in the ‘Quiet Lounge’, and the passengers listen to the impromptu recital:

This was not somebody who was trying to remember the piece - she was a true musician.

She finishes with a march from O’Carolan:

Sean become aware again of this girl’s kindness to her father and imagined him in his wheelchair listening, allowing these very notes to briefly dissolve away his pain. And on top of this he imagined O’Carolan in his cave of permanent darkness, conceiving the notes. How could he know that, centuries later, it would move a man and his wife, travelling through rough seas between Ireland and their home. But then, if he was an artist, how could he not know?

This is the power of literature too, and stories so comfortable in their own skin as MacLaverty’s are: they face mortality, they embrace the complexity of the human condition, they do not give us easy answers. 

The final story in the book, ‘Blackthorns: County Derry, 1942’, demonstrates this: Peter, a poor father on a walk with two daughters is scratched by a blackthorn. He develops septicaemia. The local doctor assesses him and delivers a devastating diagnosis to the man’s wife. American troops have arrived (a villageful of Cary Grants), and Dr Irvine socialises with their medic, Major Bradley Zelinski. The former is a member of the Orange Order, and sectarian; the latter is racist about ‘coloureds’ and ‘Jew-boys’. And then Zelinski mentions the new antibacterial juice now being mass-produced following its discovery by Fleming in his petri dish. The pair rush to collect doses of penicillin to give to Peter.

This final story is a masterpiece: I can’t do it justice here. It also startled me for a personal reason: in the war, in England, my own mother was mortally ill with septicaemia. Again through a connection with the American forces, some penicillin, the wonder drug, were sourced. She survived. And, years later, I was born.