The Apparitions - Anne Devlin

You probably shouldn't look for a single overarching theme much less a through-narrative in a diverse collection of short stories, but in the case of The Apparitions, Anne Devlin's first collection in over 35 years, such is the coherency of the themes that each reader could find something unique and personal within it. The title story of the collection Winter Story (The Apparitions) indeed clearly sets the tone for what is to follow, in a meeting between a man and a woman who only know each other from a passing familiarity when they both went to or worked in the same bar many years ago. The story, and what follows, becomes a gathering together of impressions and memories, of travels and personal journeys, the people and the things that have stuck with us over the years that float back in the memory like apparitions, demanding that we take notice of them.

The best short stories work this way, not relying on narrative as the sole means of telling a story but seeking to find an elusive idea from an assembly of sentiments that exists outside of it. The second story in the collection, Cornucopia, even seems to try to capture an image or impression of that in the idea of a broken ornament that brings together many different feelings connected to it and to where it has been over the years. It suggests a relentless search for something that can only be described as liberty, but that word alone isn't enough to hold everything together. Perhaps, like the ornament, it still holds its attraction in the fact that it (the ornament/the search/the story) remains imperfect, otherwise there would be no need to write longingly, searchingly for it.

In The Transit of Mercury it's another object, a chest of drawers "to keep nine children in", a reliquary that "had housed the power to call me home", but it is of course tied to memories and family, freedom and creativity. "This is the power the chest holds, the memory of her practice of writing". A ferry ramp becomes a ski slope in When in '63 it Snowed, where you get a vividly expressive line like "The hail fell like rocks onto the windscreen, a collision with the iceberg of the unspoken". There's a similar collision of events and memories all blended together in recollections of times of snow. Is there a real connection there, or is it our minds and imagination that allows connections to be forged into something else?

In Under the Westway there is the beginning of a tentative exploration around where such ideas and the removing of conventional rational barriers between the past and present might lead. "She had not allowed herself to know her own mind. There were things she wouldn't allow herself think about. But she knew whenever she removed the screen, it would be a mess". But above all there is an unstoppable, essential urge to air these questions, these memories and apparitions and understand them. It's a human urge but it's also a writer's urge to craft, to blend memory and experience with fiction and narrative to see what they might reveal.

The two subsequent longer stories succeed in drawing from deeper family and cultural baggage on questions of identity, where it is derived from and how you - if you can - escape from it. In Lamp, the narrator is living in a yet unnamed cul de sac in England, working as an actor, carrying fears and conditioning from her home in Northern Ireland, worrying about the neighbours and unsure how to behave. There is a lot to unpack in this, but it helps that the narrator is trying to explain herself to a counsellor concerned for her troubling behaviour, trying to explain herself to neighbours and to another actor. The story is incredibly rich in imagery, humour and wonderful time slips of memory. The need to write becomes paramount here in a beautiful image of birds retrieving burnt scraps of writing from flowerpots to "unearth the pieces of her shattered mind" to preserve "an image for later years, of a mind unable to bear the knowledge of what had happened to it."

A Place called Dam builds on this and takes things further, relating the sense of disconnect with the experience of being lost in Amsterdam, being an outsider and unsure of your place in it. Trying but unable to escape one's personal history, memories inevitably surge forth. "Memories are what age us" the narrator realises, a journey that when we look back over it could scare us to death. Again, the importance of art, theatre, writing and performance weaves through the confusion, becoming a way of understanding or sharing common (or not so common) experience, finding inspiration in Van Gogh and Anne Frank not so much connecting with as feeling part of a continuance with something deeper. The longest and for me the most impressive story in the collection, it seems a summation of all the other stories thus far, coming closer to an answer to the predicament of questions of personal liberty and identity lying within the flux and flow of memory and time; closer to understanding, but perhaps not yet finding the means to address it.

The final story, The Adoption Feast reminds you that there is another rich seam of memory running through all the stories in the collection that are very much tied into questions of identity; family, of course. "The clogged wreckage of childhood joins the flow of memory" here, the realisation that liberty is bound to the forces of family and family history, tied up in ladders of snow and strips of ribbon that reach back and reach forward. In a story within the story (families are all stories within stories) a gypsy fortune teller might seem like a less reliable way of getting to the truth, but there is wisdom to be found there nonetheless.

There's a real sense of experimentation in this collection, but not for the sake of experimentation. It's a necessary way of trying to find a voice that can express or make sense of something that may even partly elude the author. There is a restless striving to find new meaning in old memories, an ability to take a fresh look on the past from a new perspective, not so much as a way of rewriting the past as much as incorporating it into the present, striving for understanding and grasping the totality of the experience of life. The stories In The Apparitions deal with the problem of being alive in the present while trying to connect it to the past. We all live in a place where the present and memory coexist and in this remarkable collection, Anne Devlin maps out a path where the unravelling can be laid out and weaved into something meaningful and personal for each reader. 

Reading notes: The Apparitions by Anne Devlin is published by Arlen House. For someone who reads more eBooks than hardcopy, it's a joy to hold and read this beautiful paperback edition with a lovely cover and interior artwork. I've known Anne Devlin as the sister of my best friend from childhood in the 1980s, a neighbour who lived a few doors down the street from me. Since her return to Belfast I see her now and again in passing and remain a friend of the Devlin family. It's tempting then to read autobiographical elements into the book and they are certainly there, but really the stories transcend that. I had no idea this new collection was coming out and am thrilled and impressed with what she has produced here, finding it genuinely open and ambitious writing that offers freedom to the reader to find their own paths, ideas and interpretations.