A book full of short stories is always welcome. A series of short trips as opposed to one long journey in a novel. This collection from Angela Graham offers a variety of those short trips. Stories from Wales, Northern Ireland, where Angela Graham hails from, and Italy. Twenty-six stories, each one different but with a thread of similarity in theme – characters at a crossroads in life.

Many of these tales have been published and several have won prizes. It’s not hard to see why. The prose is elegant with a clarity of voice and purpose. The tone matches the tales they tell providing the reader with a sense of both place and person. The use of Welsh and Ulster Scots in some of these stories brings a vivacity to the page.

These narratives are both contemporary and historic in nature, spanning a past endured or imagined and present experiences. The characters in their different ways each face a decision - how to continue with their lives after some event that has had an impact on their sense of who they are or what their beliefs tell them. Particular favourites are 'Life-Task' and 'All Through the Night'; poignant and haunting stories lingering in the mind long after the book is closed.

A City Burning presents the reader with memorable characters and thought-provoking stories, its lyrical writing and depth of perception providing insight into the human condition.

The acclaimed Irish short story writer, Claire Keegan, has stated that, ‘the short story begins after what happens, happens.’ After the drama has passed is the territory the writer has to work within: a time, a place, and a context of emotional consequences where, after the water has been stirred up and settled, what was before, is not now.

The making of a short story into a beautiful art form is therefore a delicate and challenging craft.  And Belfast-born Angela Graham has risen to that challenge, exhibiting in her debut collection, A City Burning, twenty-six stories which allow the reader to feel the emotional intensity of a range of characters as they stand at pivotal moments in their lives in the aftermath of personal tragedy.

Territory and transition

So to unpack Graham’s territory. Although all stories are unified by the theme of transition as characters move towards a new ‘now’ (though perhaps not ‘new normal’) in their lives, the stories move over a wide time-span – from the end of World War 2 to the current COVID-19 era – within the geographical settings of Northern Ireland, Wales and Italy.

‘The Road,’ the opening story in the collection sets the tone for the reader’s journey ahead. The narrator (an adult filmmaker) looks back at herself as a child through the lens of a camera – a Catholic living in Protestant East Belfast in the summer of 1969 where ‘something huge was burning’. From the perspective of the new now, the narrator states that there was “another angle” that the lens did not capture: a moment of choice where she herself was witness to soldiers being murdered during the ‘Troubles’.

Angle of vision

Graham’s cinematic angle of vision winds through this collection as does the idea of bearing witness to, in the many first person narratives, told with an unflinching eye. In ‘Life-Task,’ a lone and lonely man waits in a large crowd at a station for the arrival of Italian prisoners-of-war to be unloaded off an approaching train. Even though he has ‘no one to imagine in particular’ he stands and observes. Graham brings everything into sharp focus as the train, approaching along the tracks, finally closes the “far distance over the surface of Europe, the distance between them and us” and the narrator sets himself to learn anew and rebuild his life on seeing something shockingly beautiful.

These are quiet stories. Tales of ordinary people getting on with their ordinary lives trying to cope as best they can and battling on. In ‘Acting Abby’ Graham cleverly creates a story within a story, in which Abby, an actress, dissects an author’s script. Her response encapsulates what all the stories are about and what makes them function so successfully as bursts of light in often dark places.

‘Most people’s lives are small-scale. That’s what so awful when the Bad Thing happens: the life just bursts apart ‘cos it wasn’t meant to contain this much pain.’

Deep water

These are stories that are often long in the making in characters’ lives. In story-telling language, the inciting event was the ‘once upon a time’ and the ‘unfolding’ of the tale only emerges in the present, prompted by a crisis, or sometimes a reconnection with a familiar place, or object, that evokes memory. As Myrtle, a woman in her sixties says in ‘Snapshot:’‘Some damage doesn’t show till later.’

Nowhere is this more evident than in ‘Coasteering’ (one of my favourites in the collection) in which a fifty-something mother literally jumps into the deep water (a metaphoric pre-requisite for the writer of a short story) in the sea off the Antrim coast during her first summer ‘without children or young grown-ups,’ longing to take a risk that she’d never taken before and realising that it was ‘a great way to let go of time.’

This story, where the sea is present (as it is in many others such as ‘The Sea Hospital’ and ‘Sugared Almonds’) reveals a writer with a love of water, who knows the places she writes about from the ground up and from the surface of the ocean down. These are first hand, lived-experiences made real again on the page in the sense of place she re-creates for the reader. You can see and taste what her character does as she swims in water ‘which was bizarrely like swimming in scentless Guinness.’

And this:

‘Unlike those massive blue stretches of the far south, our northern Irish sea has no steady colour. It takes its hue from the coming and going of the sun as it parts clouds – to raise – from the dun acres of water far below, shining fields of vivid jade wrapped in the darkest bottle green. Seen from cliff-tops, these colours display themselves as vast sheets of luminous intensity.’

Graham has a finely-tuned ear and mind as well as a finely-tuned eye. Her voice is therefore not singular, but plural: lyrical, colloquial, political and philosophical. She has an affinity to many languages as revealed in her Ulster Scots, Italian and Welsh characters and on occasion, there is wry and mordant humour. She also knows the power of the unsaid.

Loss and untidy endings

Graham, like Keegan, understands that the short story is ultimately about loss. For fiction is a temporal art and time is irreversibly passing. Things will never be what they once were. This collection reveals Graham’s understanding of the human condition in that at times of greatest loss, emotional stress, and self-realisation there are often no words. Or few, as illustrated by Juliet, a married woman in ‘Safety First,’ suddenly realising the enormity of her situation, poised between husband and lover:

‘She recognised that he and she would hold their pain in place till it evaporated. No explosion. A dismantling by silent, invisible stages. Many, many days.’

In conclusion, to return to Keegan, who has also stated that short stories are not just about what is on the page, but about what is left behind after the final page is turned.  A City Burning is a collection that will live long in the mind as it succeeds in doing what it should: convey our human struggle with all its untidy endings. For after all, the short story is a mirror of life where death is the only tied-up ending.

It is a collection that confirms Graham’s place as a serious and accomplished writer of this most beautiful, yet often under-valued, work of art.

A City Burning, by Angela Graham, published in October 2020, is a collection of 26 short stories set variously in Northern Ireland, Wales and Italy. Each richly focused, tales provide finely drawn moments of realisation of their protagonist’s joy or tragedy. 

Take for example the story of 'The Triumph', a witty account of a patient’s somewhat victory in receiving her preferred option of varicose vein treatment. In what at first might seem a modest plot, Graham’s astute handling of veins and vanities teaches us much about human frailty and dignity in the interplay between female patient, young male surgeon and blustering older male consultant.   

Troubled Histories

This is an assured debut from Graham. Originally from Belfast, she enjoyed a highly successful career as a television and film producer in Wales and on the continent before becoming a full-time writer. From the story of 'The Road' which captures a fractious 1969 Belfast from the point of view of a beleaguered Catholic in a majority-Protestant East Belfast, to “Amnesty” which explores the aftermath of a shocking public suicide, each narrative is vividly poised, compact and perfectly suited for the acts of confession and realisation that occur. Throughout, Graham shows a fascination with moments of calm within conflict, and conflict within calm.

Graham is often keen to focus on the experience of those not usually written into accounts of troubled histories, in particular Northern Ireland’s recent past. In 'Witness' we follow the horror experienced by the character Harman, who informed his pastor of a shooting at a County Fermanagh Gospel Hall. In another example, Graham represents the experiences of children and young people in turmoil, forced to take sides during the Troubles, or struggling against this process in 'Resistance'. One particularly powerful passage sticks with the reader: “That she would never let herself be washed away, never give up. I will cause ripples too. It was love or hate, resist or drown”. 

Spiritual and More Tensions

Another common theme running through Graham’s collection is her examination of religious spiritual and moral tensions. In 'Above it All', set perhaps as closely to the centre of Rome’s Catholic heartland as possible, we learn how Donal, a man adrift within his confessional order, seeks to comprehend the conflicting pathways towards love and beatification. His journey offers a powerful exploration of ambiguities present in being a representative of the Church under the scrutiny of an overweening hierarchy and traditions; the discovery of love and desire, and individuals’ perceptions of mutual attraction.

Looking Afresh at Shared Predicaments

A City Burning traverses time, place and memory with refreshing bite. It provides a means to return and reflect on painful moments in Northern Ireland’s recent past, but also to move out and trace other worlds and places across Europe whose histories and tragedies are equally compelling. Images of the sea and swimming recur throughout several stories. 'Coasteering' comes to mind, where Graham provides some fantastic poetic reflections on Irish seascapes. 

What fires the attention is Graham’s mastery of language and her ear for local speech of both the poetic and prosaic kind. Her experimentation with Ulster Scots in particular points to a new talent in Irish writing making us look afresh at our often shared predicaments and take consolation in the landscapes and people around us.