Walking The Dog And Other Stories

WALKING THE DOG AND OTHER STORIES by Bernard MacLaverty. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1995. 198 pages. $20.

Bernard MacLaverty's fourth collection of stories begins not with a short story but with this vignette:

   "This is a story with a trick beginning."

      Your man put down his pen and considered the possibility that if he left
   this as the only sentence then his story would also have a trick ending.

In addition to this piece, entitled "On the Art of the Short Story," there are nine other vignettes interspersed between, and framing, the nine stories in the collection. The vignettes have in common a central character, "your man" (the ubiquitous hero of the Irish pubroom tale and in some ways the author himself), and--at least to some degree--the theme of writing, a theme not noticeably present in the stories themselves.

The nine stories, like most from MacLaverty's previous collections, are a mix of the provincial and the cosmopolitan, the personal and the communal. Most take place in Belfast, but three are set out of Ireland: two at Spanish resorts ("The Grandmaster" and "At the Beach") and another (the Kafkaesque "A Foreign Dignitary") in an unidentified country. Several directly treat the communal "troubles" of Northern Ireland, while others focus on personal relations and emotional problems, particularly marriage failures, excessive drinking, and a general lack of direction in life. "In Bed," for instance, presents an ailing 21-year-old woman who lacks the will to live, a quality that even the flea in her bed has no problem exhibiting. The husband in "At the Beach" seems intent, while he and his wife are celebrating their 25th wedding anniversary, on destroying the marriage by probing into his wife's sexual history. MacLaverty, who writes a spare, lean prose, can be as bleak about the private lives of individuals as he can about the tensions in Northern Ireland.

As a Belfast writer (though no longer a Belfast resident: he lives in Scotland), MacLaverty has always had an interest in the Irish "troubles." He is best known for Cal, his second novel (filmed in the mid-1980s), the story of a reluctant IRA terrorist who falls in love with the widow of a Protestant policeman he has helped to assassinate. In his stories he dramatizes the sectarian tensions of Northern Ireland by bringing Catholic and Protestant characters together in volatile situations. In "The Wake House," a Catholic widow and her son cross the street to the home of a Protestant widow--a house they have never entered even though the two houses are, ironically, "mirror images of each other"--for the wake of a man who habitually hurled anti-Catholic slogans at them as he came home drunk at night. In "A Silent Retreat," a Catholic schoolboy talks with a Protestant B-Special on guard duty outside a jail holding Republican prisoners. Although drawn together out of mutual interests in soccer and smoking, as well as a natural curiosity about each other's lives, the two ultimately part in an emotional scene--the guard angry, the boy afraid--once the conversation turns nasty over politics and religion. Both of these stories explore the sources of sectarian tensions. "Walking the Dog," the collection's title story (and its finest), suggests the ultimate outcome of sectarian tension and violence.

Shortly after leaving his house at night to walk his dog, a Belfast man is abducted at gunpoint by two terrorists claiming to be "from the IRA." Their object is to discover, by means of brutal interrogation, his sectarian allegiance and--if he is of the opposing side--do him some undisclosed harm. Because the man senses (accurately as it turns out) that their claim to be IRA members may not be the truth, he attempts to thwart their efforts to discover his allegiance: he gives them an ethnically neutral name; refuses to identify the school he attended; claims he professes no religion; and, when they demand he recite the alphabet, pronounces the eighth letter as both "aitch" and "haitch," aware as he is of the notion that Catholics and Protestants pronounce it differently. Frustrated by his evasions and unsure of his identity, they let him go.

The irony of the story is that, although we fully experience the man's terror, we never learn his identity: we do not know whether he is Catholic or Protestant, nationalist or unionist, or if what he says is true--that he has no allegiance, and therefore no cultural identity. The further irony of MacLaverty's story is, of course, that the Irish violence that has been fueled by cultural identity may effectively eliminate all cultural identity. MacLaverty's protagonist, a cultural nonentity, may be the future citizen of Belfast.

MICHAEL L. STOREY College of Notre Dame of Maryland

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