Tóibín on McCabe
Eugene McCabe is one of Ireland's most accomplished short story writers. He has also written a novel, Death and Nightingales, which is one of the best books to come out of Ireland in the past 20 years, and a play, King of the Castle, which has a central part in the Irish repertoire. His territory, the borderlands between Monaghan and Fermanagh, is also a place of the soul, a place in which little is said and much is understood, in which emotions are fierce and memories are long, in which much is hidden and submerged. Out of this landscape he produced his story "Music at Annahullion".
The scene is bleak, broken by an energy in the writing, which comes from the very exact descriptions of things, places, characters, and the use of a second voice within the voice of the story, as though someone were speaking as much as writing. The dialogue is sour; the use of the half-spoken matches the sense of isolation each of the three characters – two brothers and a sister locked together in an old house – feels. And then the sister half-says that she would like a piano which is for sale locally. McCabe's genius is to make the piano stand for itself and then to have an extraordinary resonance as it comes to stand for all her hope, and for all our hopes. The last page of the story is inspiring in its emotional force and clarity, as the story is in its sympathy and its subtlety.
Tomorrow: Margaret Drabble reads The Doll's House by Katherine Mansfield
