The Man Who Dreamt of Lobsters. - book reviews

Food and hunger are recurring motifs in the collection of stories The Man Who Dreamt of Lobsters, by Michael Collins. The characters who inhabit these stories are constantly eating or planning meals, though they are never able to satisfy themselves. Gluttony will not help, because the emptiness they feel emanates not from their stomachs but from their souls.

Set mostly in Ireland, the stories tell of characters whose lives are depressingly gray. They are widows or unloved sons, abused daughters, small-time IRA types. They seem to sense that their fates are at best desperate, but are unable to stop or deflect the rush of events. They struggle for a time, they flounder, and usually they accept.

In one of Collins's strongest stories, "First Love," another near-constant to the collection is introduced: the cowardly and mean-spirited male. Hennessey is his name, a father of three who has recently lost his wife. He's a man who runs rabbits with dogs, a drunkard, a careless man more afraid of appearing soft in the eyes of his fellow alcoholics than he is of neglecting his children. The story seems to be his, but Collins effortlessly shifts point of view, and we enter the world of Bridget, Hennessey's eldest, who has become a mother to her two siblings. Left in the family car while Hennessey and Co. drink themselves toward joy, Bridget tries to fathom her sad life: why this father? why her mother's death? why the terrible responsibility of two children? She finds few answers. All she truly understands is the pain of her life, movingly described by Collins in an ending that shocks and terrifies.

"The Meat Eaters" concerns the life of Rory, on the run for his involvement with the IRA. He flees to America for safety, but finds little. His companions are the meat eaters of the title, ravenous and dangerous men whom Rory fears but cannot leave. He has made a terrible mistake on the flight over, possibly alerting the authorities to his presence, and he waits for the end.

Rory struggles with a problem many of these characters face: the conflict between myth and reality. Rory believes his Irishness will protect him in America, a place where people want "to be Irish ... [and] believe in pots of gold at the ends of rainbows." Yet, in the end, myth is not enough to keep evil at bay, and though Rory and others try to find solace in the romantic, they must return to life's grinding hurt.

It is difficult to read a collection by an Irish writer and not think of Joyce's Dubliners, especially when the emotional and intellectual paralysis that Joyce detailed is so apparent in these stories, too. Yet Collins is his own writer, his voice strong, as capable of the lyric as of the harsher tones of a difficult world. He's writing of an Ireland that's not so much new as contemporary, its paralysis more fixed, the cycle of victims and victimizers more vicious. Joyce would have recognized the terrain, though maybe not the intensity.

BRIAN MCCOMBIE Emporia State University

COPYRIGHT 1994 Studies in Short Fiction
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