Country of the Grand

'How many people get to hear what their friends think about them?' Gerard Donovan asked an audience at the 2008 Edinburgh international book festival. It is an excrutiating thought, and one that comes true for Jim, a character in the first story from Donovan's collection Country of the Grand.

Twenty minutes early for his regular morning dip in Galway Bay with his friends Eric and John, he decides to go it alone. By the time they turn up, Jim has finished his swim and is drying himself in a changing-room cubicle. Eric and John, unaware of his presence, start talking about him.

'Morning Swimmers' plays out with stomach-churning inevitability. At first Jim decides not to reveal himself in order to spare his friends' embarrassment, but at what point will it become possible for him to do so? Donovan cranks the gears of the story until finally, horribly, they slip, plummeting the reader towards the fearfully expected conclusion .

The stories in this collection were written over a period of fifteen years, coinciding with the brief roar of the so-called Celtic Tiger, which brought to Ireland an unprecendented and surprising affluence. Country of the Grand, then, has a double meaning, indicating both wealth and, in its very Irish meaning, contentment. Now, however, the tiger has retracted its claws, leaving Ireland to face the consequences of its rapid, unplanned growth.

It wasn't Donovan's intention to write a collection based on this subject, but happily the stories fit. 'Archaeologists', for example - one of the best stories in the book - is about a couple working together on a rescue dig, under pressure from the contruction foreman who can't afford to waste another day, but it is also about Emma's growing realisation  both that her relationship with petulant Robert is over and that she doesn't know what she will do with her life. It is a moving indictment of so-called progress and the decreasing importance of the past in modern life, both personal and historical.

Other stories are equally affecting: a woman discovers that her recently deceased husband led a double life that she knew nothing about; a boy who stops speaking after his father is killed in an accident looks on as his mother's subsequent relationship goes wrong; a well-to-do solicitor joins a fun-run in his business suit after one too many Friday lunchtime whiskeys. These are the crises and breakdowns of modern life, depressing in their ubiquity.

At the Edinburgh event, Donovan was asked about the craft of writing short stories. 'A really good story will responds to the characters it creates,' he said. This might, in his words, 'create dilemmas for the writer' but it pays dividends for the reader. Donovan's characters are so very real; they exist within the story but seem somehow to have a very private space around them, Emma in her trench, Mary in the house she didn't know her husband owned.  The country may be grand, but the gulfs between people are growing wider and wider.