Website of Aiden O'Reilly

The opening story is about text bullying among teenage schoolgirls. The title What Rose Did, has an ominous ring. Rose Carney, we soon learn, hung herself from the branch of a tree. The story is related by Tracy, the mother of teenager Leanne. At first Tracy attempts to comfort Leanne, thinking she must be upset by the news. The family’s domestic routines are described, but as in the best horror movies, our perceptions have been subtly shifted and there is no comfort this familiarity.
“Saturday morning the boys were back playing the game Santa had brought them. I was in the utility room, sorting clothes by the washing machine. I could hear them arguing and, when it turned nasty, I found them rolling about on the floor, boxing, grabbing at hair, the game over.”
Harmless roughhousing, part of growing up? Or a hint of the darker side of human nature that cannot be eradicated?

Suspicions begin to grow around the role of the daughter, Leanne. It’s remarkable how depictions of the teenage girl lounging on her bed can seem so eerie. Her father seems to have a better intuition of what might have happened – but what kind of father is it who can so readily suspect his daughter of wishing someone dead? This is murky stuff indeed and the scene where the father tries to wrestle the incriminating mobile phone from Leanne makes for uncomfortable reading.

There’s a tension in many of these stories, a hint of dread. There’s also a lot a lot of soul – many of them have the impact of a ballad: there’s no startling twist but the emotive power catches you by surprise.

Guys and the Way they Might Look at You is about a couple whose marriage has grown cold; the man’s libido is apparently flagging. They remain remarkably civil to each other. They have children at university, yet they seem quite sporty, go to the gym, use the internet, and are in every way ‘modern’ for want of a better word. I liked the portrayal of this couple, who feel familiar to me, and yet they are not pinned to any familiar notions of Irishness as mediated to us. They hook up with a couple from Kerry, who likewise are presented just as themselves, and could be from anywhere.
This story was my favourite in the collection. It had a constant tension and also a hard-to-define atmosphere of unreality. If these people come across as unauthentic (though perhaps only to me), it’s not because they are not out there in the real world, it’s because they have never achieved authenticity in their lives.

In the best of O’Reilly’s stories there is no sense of artifice, the reader doesn’t ever think this is someone making things up. We are faced directly to reality. The writer Philip O’Casey makes an astute observation in his blurb when he says “some of them could be from today’s headlines.” And just as with many a newspaper story, you might well ask yourself “is this what the world’s coming to?”

The title story is another good one, with Irish men on the tear in Amsterdam.

Why didn’t social media tell me O’Reilly was this good?

PS Yes it feels odd to write about O’Reilly

• The players are born within the sound of hammers. Whether a great boom across rivers and docks or the tap, tap, tap from backyard workshops, the sounds of metal and stone are always close by. The rattle of the railway and tram, the tapping of the nailyard, chainyard, pottery, the blasting of stone from quarries, the hacking of coal from deep underground, the roar of a furnace. They hold in them the energy of fire and dammed rivers. Di Stéfano and Billy Wright look out on their iron bridges, Beckenbauer’s dad delivers his post through the snow and ash of ruined Munich, while Jack and Bobby Charlton’s father lies deep underground scraping coal.
• When the supporters pile out on the away car park in Anvil Yards, next to the yellow concrete of the bus station, the sun glints on the towers of scrap over by the canal, and they sing Gyppos, and What a fucking shithole. Some of them take off their shirts. Their blond hair and white bellies move across the plain.
  ‘Who are yer? Who are yer?’
  ‘We are iron men, from the Iron Towns, come from the Anvil Yards,’ they reply from the Greenfield end.
• The boy Tyrone is still smiling, looks daft in the sunlit doorway, his eyes following Alina hidden somewhere back in the kitchen. Dee Dee cannot begin to imagine what they are saying to each other, but doesn’t need to, she supposes. She wonders whether to mention him to Alina later, decides not to. She’s never teased her like that, never pried, tried not to show how much she worries, how much she has put into being the girl’s mother, this lovely, lonely girl, and sometimes thinks there is more than one way of spoiling a child.
• Caesar sailed up the river but the people were ready. They set great iron spikes beneath the still waters. Caesar’s ships were drowned and the valley filled with water.
  Then Caesar came a third time and the people ran and hid, and the valley filled with ghosts.
  There is always a war. Invaders come and go, settle and remain, become the people that live among the valleys and the stones, wait things out, hollow out the hills and burn their black insides. There is always a war, always a fire that burns within, without, and the rivers only ever run with blood.
  Arthur died on the muddy, muddy banks.
  There was no boat to carry him.
• ‘You’ll have to smarten up your act, love,’ his mother repeated phrases she used to say to him when he was a kid. He smiled at this, a man in his thirties crumpled in the soft armchair in his parents’ front room.
  ‘All their furniture is too big for the house,’ is something Greta had said to him, and it was true, he’d never noticed before, but it was.
  Strangers all of them, to each other, to themselves.