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TThe stories in the fourth volume of Northern Irish author Lucy Caldwell are often devoted to family life, or professional life in the arts: or both. They are always about memory and how to care for it. He offers some continuity with his previous collections, A crowd of people, Close relationships and Openness, although it is intuitive and natural rather than directly descriptive.
In the Big Book, Luke returns to his childhood home, only to be taken back slowly. They use it to clean the house, put it on the market; they consider all the possibilities that they may have when sold. But the longer he stays, the more he can’t leave, and the more he remembers, not only his life here, but his whole life. Now he’s a 40-year-old divorcee with a bad back, an alcoholic and a boarding school kid, trying to come to terms with the divorce, the death of his mother and his haunted mind. A one-night stand with his ex-wife’s sister doesn’t help. As you read, the chapter moves between dark humor and bleak optimism.
Hamlet, A Love Story is a theme full of pitfalls, too. In a dive bar in New York after the new play Choose Your Own Hamlet ends, playwright Sonya somehow ends up with Callum, who is not her type. He’s willing to bet that it’s not his either. He has decided that the flaw in his play – in which Hamlet jumps and repeats the first text, desperately seeking “a way out of all that lies ahead” – is that Choose Your Last Text doesn’t just encourage choice, it rewards action. “Inaction was punished. Your only hope was to… seize the issue.”
The Lady of the House seems like an old magical story, with the gates of the house, old books with “gray flowers of mold on the inner covers”, and a curse from 1660. Two sisters – one of them, the text will only refer to as “you”; another is called “Lou” – look for similarities when one visits a renovated warehouse in Scotland. The memory ghosts rise to match the ghost the unnamed sister encounters on her first night in the guest room. Lou, exhausted and frustrated with child care after seven years of IVF, miscarriages and financial problems, admits that “unexpected things have happened recently – things that you wouldn’t call proper memories … They are not sure “what you are supposed to do with it, and any of it”.
Caldwell’s character shows courage. At the same time they are broken. They show their lives in times of spiritual and emotional loneliness, supported and overcome at the same time by the anxiety they have that life is important even if it cannot be solved. Although they are overwhelmed by other situations, they have the feeling that they are failing in their work. In Little Lands, the work is for your future: the repetition of the shot played in The Sound of Music is combined and challenged by the real life of Christopher Plummer and Julie Andrews, who, we are told, fell in love during the filming of the dance and regretted not having done anything about it. Even for the violinist Harmony Hill, traveling alone on a plane with an instrument “bigger than the United States of America”, his work is what he has for his talent and – especially – his teachers: passion as a leader. The work of community, memory and where he came from, culminates in All Grown Up when Luke realizes that if he is not careful – if he does not choose his destiny – his future may be the same.
These stories are full of joy in life and spirit one minute, terror in mind and emotions the next. They are thought out enough to be enjoyed, one at a time, with an interest that responds to the writer’s purpose. We are each of us God, the active, devoted mother of A Family Christmas thinks, “then, the sky wants to know itself.” We are the aperture, the point of light, beyond all perception. Caldwell is really talking about the author’s dedication here, about himself, and, more importantly, about this kind of story.
One of the most striking features of Devotions is its vision, evident in the catalog of objects on display, the sharpness of Caldwell’s eye, his capture of the moment. They talk about sleeping in “the sprawling acres of American hotel doubles, and cheap news for the company”, and you’re right there. “A little way up,” he told us somewhere, “they peeled and fell like snowflakes.” Little things like this, the place, the people, the relationships between them, what they say and how they say it, everything seems real. he saw. There is no other way to describe it. It’s inspiring, scary, quietly romantic and somehow comforting. Never crushed or exaggerated, they are always oblique but perfectly humanized. If you need a window to look at the world, it’s here.
M John Harrison’s The End of Everything was published by Serpent’s Tail in June. Devotions by Lucy Caldwell published by Faber (£14.99). To support the Guardian, order your book from guardianbookshop.com. Shipping fees may apply.
