'Homesickness' by novelist Colin Barrett is a must buy

It's a relief to see working-class Irish lives being captured with this up close familiarity and insight, and in his new collection 'Homesickness' author Colin Barrett is familiar with the many traps Irish life can spring on them. 

Just the first page of Colin Barrett's new collection Homesickness could be used to teach a creative writing masterclass. It would be a pedestrian use of his cinematic prose but you get the idea, this is a world-class talent at work. 

The opening story is called A Shooting In Rathreedane and it begins with a phone call to a sleepy County Mayo Garda Station, where Sergeant Jackie Noonan, in her mid-forties, picks up the receiver. 

What follows is a dive into a world of feral boys and barely grown men, where Noonan's own brilliance and capability are casually misprized, and all of this is conveyed in prose so vivid it's like you're in the squad car with her.

In the following exchange Noonan's colleague Sergeant Crean who because he's a few years older and a man is considered by all - including himself - to be her superior although both are sergeants, is looking over a new crime scene in the hills beyond.

‘They’re very presentable all the same, aren’t they?’ Crean said, nodding at the Ox Mountains.

‘They are.’

‘That’s the thing about Mayo. I find it’s very presentable from a distance. It’s only up close it lets you down.’ 

Noonan managed a smile.

The writing conveys character, and the character's interior life, and evokes the place that the story is set in with the kind of unity of purpose that would have impressed Aristotle. Even more impressive is the ease with which so much information is so elegantly conveyed. 

It's a relief to see working-class Irish lives being captured with this up close familiarity and insight, and Barrett is familiar with the many traps Irish life can spring on them. Homesickness is about people who have stopped fitting in in the towns where they were raised, or about people who have become sick of the only homes they have known, now grown alienated, angry or othered and looking for a lost light they can't find.

Mental illness, substance abuse, dissolute, directionless young people, they're all here as is a wry humor that underpins all the formal invention. There's beauty too, in between the bouts of sheer mayhem, evidence of a gifted writer at work.

Grove Press, $18.00