FORGET Joyce. Forget Beckett. Forget Yeats, even. Think, instead, of Roddy Doyle. Or if Irish fiction has never been your cup of tea, think of the underbelly vernacular of Scottish writer Irvine Welsh together with the squalid escapism of Londoner Hanif Kureishi and you get a fair idea of the shenanigans which inhabit the inner linings of this anthology.
Having said that, the 19 writers in this collection skip past the usual ramblings about the empty lives of their working-class characters. Instead of staging set-pieces, they stage a riotous coup: Otherwise mundane suburban existences are injected with plots which are offbeat and often surreal. Bizarre episodes include a late-night attempt to kidnap and a prize boar for its semen (Coline Murphy 'Red Isuzu') and a couple bent on ramming their car into a truck on the highway (Caspar Walsh 'N 52', an acid rave in a graveyard on Halloween Night (Emer Martin 'The Pooka at Five Happiness') and homicidal lunatics who take out a Ludo board every night but keep it without playing because "approaching the board is like opening and closing possibilities, home, death, life, winning and losing" (Imelda O'Reilly 'Stovepipe').
Yet, even though the themes seem to border on the ridiculous, one only needs to tug at the corners to find that what lies below is not all wicked fun. ‘Stained Glass Violations' by Mike McCormack is about a woman who loses her appetite for food because of her new-found passion for glass eating and steals the baby Jesus from the church window. When the woman eventually finds out that she is a pregnant virgin, the tale loses its hilarious sheen and becomes a serious parody of the immaculate conception. An ambiguous voice at the end of the story says: "I am not going to let it happen like that again – I am and I have memory and this time it is going to be different. "
Likewise, in Colin Carberry's ‘Digging A Hole' about a down-and-out grave robber the seemingly literal assumes metaphorical depth when the protagonist's existential frustration finds a place in the short story's central motif: "It felt like digging a hole in the fine sand on the beach. No matter how careful you were, the sides would collapse and the space would be filled. You could never make an impact."
Thankfully, the writers in Shenanigans do have an impact. The accessibility of their works may have something to do with the fact that many of them have a vicarious connection with popular music.
Sarah Champion , before editing this anthology, was known for her collections Disco Biscuits and Disco 2000. Joe Ambrose is a deejay and part of a hip-hop group, Imelda O'Reilly's poems appear on movie soundtracks, and Donal Scannell works with Dublin-based Quadraphonic and Stereophonic Records.
The chapters themselves are replete with the pounding beat of drum-and-bass and jungle rhythms. Characters get high on ecstasy and acid and listen all day to the music of Portishead, Beck, Garbage and Van Morrison.
At the rave party in ‘The Pooka On Five Happiness', the protagonist declares in a moment of sheer bliss: "The track the deejay was playing was one I had never heard before. Jazz and techno was cut up and mangled by urban nightmares- and if we could dance to car alarms then we would be prepared for the beginning of the next thousand years."
The Irish writer's interest in music is not new; one will remember that Booker prize winner Roddy Doyle first made his mark with his novel The Commitments in which he maintains the storyline linked to music. And did Joyce not name his first collection of poems Chamber Music? In fact, one would not be wrong to apply an analogy with music artistes to these writers: They are like what Nigel Kennedy and Vanessa Mae are to classical music – artistes whose craft is worthy of the old school but who possess their own brand of eccentric delivery.
That is not to say that new Irish writers have shed their illustrious literary mould entirely - certainly not when the characters they write about still cope with life by taking in plenty of alcohol, cigarettes and laughter. In fact, given that Irish fiction has always been about curing the wretchedness and absurdity of life with doses of sardonic humour, would not Joyce and Beckett, if they were alive, youthful and writing prolifically today be into Shenanigans as well? Probably. Especially since their psyches would be inhabited, no longer by vaudeville and Greek gods but by discos, loud music and car bombs.
Daren Shiau is the author of the award-winning novel Heartland