Safe Return Doubtful

Irish Literature – Published 2019

This unfaltering and brilliant collection of short stories was Barrett’s debut, to be followed this year 2024) by his excellent novel Wild Houses which was longlisted for the Booker Prize.

Each story here focuses on a young male protagonist struggling through a working class life in the fictional town of Glanbeigh in County Mayo after Ireland’s financial collapse.

Calm With Horses is of novella length, at about 100 pages, and will be best known to many, as it was adapted for a very good, and successful, film in 2019. Along with the first story in the book, this is the stand-out piece, though there are no weak ones.

This is a dark and intense character-focused story that takes place in that narrow intersection of crime and literary fiction. This is where Barrett excels, the characters that haunt the pubs, streets, roads and surrounding woods, are his people; he writes about them with a beauty and toughness that encapsulates their malaise and passively and naïvely endure a fate.

Here, the protagonist, Arm, is an ex amateur boxer who is earns some cash with an enterprising young dope dealer who is also his childhood friend, Dympa. At the opening of the story he is waiting patiently in the car while his boss confronts an old man who abused his family’s hospitality by trying to climb into bed with a fourteen year old girl. That Dympa reluctantly orders a beating and insists on nothing more says a lot about him. But, it isn’t over there.. when the ‘uncles’ hear of it, they demand a much more severe retribution.

The other stand-out is the opening story, The Clancy Kid, in which young love turns to heartbreak, an introduction to the bleak and grim existence of the community, as well as the kind of violence that permeates male youth culture.

Here’s a couple of clips from it..

We pit-stop at Carcetti’s fast-foodery and chow down on chips as we take the towpath by the river. Slender reeds brush against one another as cleanly as freshly whetted blades. The wet shore-stone, black as coal, glints in its bed of algae. Crushed cans of Strongbow and Dutch Gold and Karpackie are buried in the mud like ancient artefacts. Thickets and thickets of midges waver in the air. They feast on the passing planets of our heads.

and..It was warm out, and getting warmer it seemed. We were enduring a marathon hot snap, a thirteen-day stretch of rainlessness unheard of in our otherwise perennially sodden clime. Water shortages bedevilled the farmsteads surrounding our town. Pasture had paled and browned and in the open country you could stand by the side of an empty road and hear the massed dry ticking of the bramble ditches that fringed the fields. Cows grouped in the shadow patch thrown by a lone dollop of cumulus and followed that patch as the cloud drifted across the sky. Dogs nuzzled the undersides of stones, seeking the moisture clinging there. In town, pensioners staggered in a sunstroked trance from street to street and tried to recall their destination.

My GoodReads score 5 / 5