Before he became known as one of the greatest playwrights of the last century, Brian Friel wrote short stories, mainly for the New Yorker. Two collections published in the 1960s were filleted by Friel himself for a Selected Stories in 1979, which is now retitled and reissued – and it is a solid gold treat from top to tail.
Friel as a story writer is funnier than John McGahern, livelier than William Trevor. The model perhaps is Frank O’Connor: witty, short tales of country folk sufficiently larger-than-life to be interesting, but keeping one foot firmly on the ground. The stories take place in Friel’s stamping ground of north-west Ireland – including in the fictional town of Ballybeg, where many of his plays would be set – and filled with people eager to make a mark.
In The Widowhood System, a recently widowed man determines to breed a champion racing pigeon (“With the old woman out of the road and the place to myself there’s nothing to stop me now!”); in Ginger Hero, a boy who’s taken up cock fighting wants to pit his bird against the local ace. “Are you mad?” asks his friend. “That’s not a cock – that’s an ostrich!”
Naturally, the dialogue is spot-on, but Friel captures people expertly in description too. In Foundry House, perhaps the best story here, an old man listens in fearful awe to a tape recording of his daughter’s voice that she’s sent from Rhodesia. “Mr Bernard could not move himself to face the recorder but his eyes were on it, the large, startled eyes of a horse.”
Friel can switch between modes – tender, surprising – in his characterisation, but the overall tone is comic. In Mr Sing My Heart’s Delight, a boy’s granny who lives in remote County Donegal asks him: “Were you in a bus ever? Was it bad on the stomach, was it?” In The Illusionists, argumentative one-upmanship between a teacher and a travelling magician reaches manic heights.
The only downside of reading these stories is knowing that Friel stopped writing them to concentrate on his stage work. We wouldn’t want to be without his plays, but his prose fiction is just as tremendous.