I’ve mentioned After a Dance (2024) in this newsletter before, when I included it in “Some books I haven’t liked as much as I thought I would” about 6 months ago. I wrote then:

I suspect that the only thing wrong with this selection may be that I approached it with excessive expectations, having given too much weight to the very favourable reviews and publicity. It’s blurbed by Roddy Doyle (“some of the wildest, arresting, just plain brilliant short stories I’ve read in a long time”) and The Irish Times (“A storytelling genius before her time”).

I foresaw that a reread after a lapse of some months might leave me better disposed towards these stories. It has certainly sharpened my appreciation of some of them. The book is compiled from O’Connor’s two earlier collections, Here Comes John (1993) and Tell Her You Love Her (1997), with two later stories. These are short stories: After a Dance contains 15 stories over 141 pages. As well as short stories, O’Connor wrote plays for stage and radio and (for the most part with her husband Peter Straughan) film scripts, including that for Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011) which won two BAFTAs and was nominated for an Oscar.

In her introduction to the selection, O’Connor’s daughter, Constance Straughan, tells us that her mother didn’t think of screenwriting as serious work, though she enjoyed it, and that Peter Straughan wrote “Short stories were her first and enduring love” (p. xiii). The introduction casts some light on the origins of some of the characters. According to Constance Straughan:

There is often a gap between who the narrator thinks they are, and who we understand them to be. Funny, then, that all four of my mother’s siblings were convinced that there was one story written about each of them. (p. x)

She goes on to say that Tina, the narrator of “I’m Running Late” was said by Bridget to be “based on my sister Peggy actually” and that “her brother James features as a best man on a bender in ‘Love Jobs’”. There might seem to be a slight inconsistency here. To say that the siblings “were convinced that” each had a story written about them, implies that they were mistaken. If the stories were actually based on the brother and sisters, surely it would make sense to say that they were, rather than that the individuals were convinced of the fact. Yet, we are told that Tina is based on Peggy and Joey is based on James.

The answer, it seems to me, is that, while these characters are depictions of O’Connor’s brother and sisters, the stories, the situations in which they find themselves, are entirely fictional. The longest story in the selection, “Heavy Petting” is one of the two later stories, having first been published in 1998 in Intoxications: an anthology of stimulant-based writing. It features a goldfish named Godfrey, who survives a lot longer than the narrator ever expected him to. The goldfish originally belonged to the narrator’s older sister, Majella, “hooped him at a fairground” and “named him after her ex-fiancé, the paratrooper, the one who’s chucked her out on the street, howling. Godfrey.” (p. 9). To start with, Majella loves the goldfish but comes to hate him after she gets into drugs and clubbing. Then, she develops a practice of coming in late with her boyfriend-dealer and trying to spear Godfrey with a rusty fork, following which the fish forms a mysterious connection or attachment to Majella’s and the narrator’s mentally ill mother. Ultimately, Godfrey is supplanted in the mother’s attentions by a mouse.

As to the real-life fish and the real-life sister, Constance Straughan tells us:

The stand-out cameo, however, is her sister Kathleen, who was once given a goldfish by a boyfriend and, when they broke up, took to trying to stab the fish to death with a fork … (p. x)

The details of the story are more elaborate and colorful, not to say bizarre, than the actual events. The narrator of this story offers this description of herself:

I was studying for A levels at the time, training hard as a Young Novelist, honing my powers of observation in little red notepads. (When I got my grades, the predicted A, A, A, I’d get to university five hundred miles away: leave home without one look back. I had to stay focused, unattached.) But I couldn’t resist saving Godfrey. (pp. 10–11)

Her determination to get away is more than adequately explained by the squalor of their living circumstances:

One day the air was a soft brown wall of unflushed loos, rusting geraniums, takeaway foods, Dust snuffed from the carpets thick as bonemeal. All day Mum made secret-recipe soups; threw great slop waves across the lawns. She’d scour the cupboards for odd ingredients. In went Majella’s old school tie, an aubergine, one cake of Cherry shoe polish … Out puffed rust and rubble, smells that made the plants cave in. (pp. 11–12; ellipsis original)

Outside, the family’s other pets — albino rabbits, tortoises, poodles with “pale dreadlocks” (p. 12) — compete for the sustenance provided by the mother’s discarded “soups”. The water in Godfrey’s tank (inherited from a former pet, a terrapin) gradually turns into another of these soups. Pieces of meat and vegetable float in it. Godfrey gets fatter and the space available to him more congested, so that he finds it increasinly harder to turn.

Then, notwithstanding the predicted As, the narrator fails her A-levels and does worse in the resits, leaving her and Godfrey both trapped. This puts it beyond doubt (where of course it should have been already) that the story is not autobiographical: Bridget O’Connor graduated from the University of Lancaster with a degree in English and Creative Writing.

I’m labouring the point about the fictional (not autobiographical) quality of these stories because it seems to me that readers and reviewers often tend to get hung up on incidental details in works of fiction that carry some echo of the author’s life, and conclude that the whole work must be a roman à clef. Recently there’s been widespread speculation that Rachel Cusk’s Life of M is really about the actor Natalie Portman. Even without having read Life of M (and having no plans to read it), I have trouble seeing this speculation as anything other than wildly implausible. Salman Rushdie somewhere tells about the suggestion by an interviewer following publication of his novel Fury (2001) that this is his most autobiographical novel yet. The book concerns a revolution in the (obviously fictional) South Pacific island of Lilliput-Blefuscu and features a very angry protagonist who at a crucial point finds himself standing over his sleeping wife and child, wielding a carving knife. How could we suppose it to be anything other than autobiographical? As a general rule, I’d suggest that it’s best to assume that fiction is wholly made up, even if we think we detect in it traces of the author’s life story.

One thing I learned in rereading After a Dance is that my initially adverse response was partly conditioned by the role played by disgust, particularly in the first two stories. The second story is “Heavy Petting”, of which I’ve given you a taste above. The first is “Love Jobs”, whose protagonist is the “best man on a bender” mentioned by Constance Straughan. The morning after the wedding of his friend, Steve, Joey (still wearing the tuxedo he slept in) takes Steve’s dog for a walk by the filthy canal. An encounter with two would-be muggers results in the dog’s falling into the canal and Joey accidentally breaks its neck while pulling it out. The muggers are immediately remorseful and, in spite of Joey’s reassuing them that the dog wasn’t his, take him boozing, carrying the dog’s corpse with them.

The vivid description of the filth of the canal and its environs, and of the dog, designedly distracts the reader’s attention from the action of Joey’s story. Steve’s marriage means the end of their musical duo, “The Two Leaves”. Years earlier they were “The Three Leaves” with Joey’s ex-wife Eve. Eve arrived at Steve’s wedding in a black Mercedes and walked right past Joey apparently without noticing him, though he was the best man. Joey is telling his new drinking companions, the muggers, who he is when an unwelcome fact is brought home to him.

Here’s me, I was going to say, really I’m a musician, like I’ve done for years … I goes, “I’m a postman.” It comes out weak. I’m thinking about it for miles. Postman. Postman Pat. I think, that’s what I am. It’s not just me day job, it’s me. (p. 6)

The front matter of the paperback reproduces praise for O’Connor’s writing from various publications, including this from The New Statesman:

In this new collection her most accomplished and most devastating stories lie side by side. O’Connor writes of everyday characters so pitiful they are ridiculous, so often they become lovable … (p. i)

This implies that the “accomplished” and the “devastating” are distinct categories that don’t overlap. Judging by these fifteen stories, I’d be inclined to accept this a broadly true, but there’s one story, “Plastered”, that belongs in both categories. It’s a first-person narrative that begins:

My name’s Tony Wornel, to cut a long story short. I believe in acting on first impressions, so when I see a bird at a party I go up to them, find their best feature and say, “Great hair,” or, “Hey,” pointing, “cat’s eyes.” It works one time out of ten. That’s not a bad average. (p. 47)

Uh-oh, we think, a sex pest. But no: the next sentence tells us that Tony is a pest of a different, and altogether stranger kind.

When I say “works” I mean social not sexual intercourse. I don’t believe in using birds like that. I like a chat. I subscribe to a number of interesting magazines. (p. 47)

It becomes clear that one or other of Tony’s “interesting magazines” has recommended that a way to make friends and find people to “chat” to is to approach women and parties and compliment them. He follows the recommendations without apparently understanding why, or knowing what he hopes to gain from these encounters. He sometimes sounds as if he were writing a lifestyle feature from one of his magazines:

Me, I like to keep busy. I like to play hard. In the evenings, if I’m not out partying, then I’m reading through my mags, or playing my electric guitar or my jazz CDs. I’ve got a Complete Jazz Lover’s Collection from the Sunday Times Magazine (though I’d say jazz is more a taste I’m acquiring). What I’d really like is to play in a rock band, as a hobby. (p. 49)

This sounds harmless enough — at any rate much less harmful than the sex pest he first sounded like would have been — but Tony is quite a danger to himself. When he follows some women who are clearly going to a party, he ends up gatecrashing a gathering at which he is the only male, the only white person and, very possibly, the only one who isn’t a lesbian.

I’ve read somewhere, in a magazine, that if friendliness fails (which it did), acting a bit berserk in a potentially dangerous situation can act as a protective shield. So I started dancing a bit, like Mary Poppins on E, thrashing around … (pp. 50–51)

This results in concussion, a broken femur and an encounter with two nurses, Katy and Tracy, to whom Tony quickly becomes a real nuisance. Katy is kind to him, to her own disadvantage, while Tracy gives him short shrift once his injuries have been attended to. He enjoys having his leg in plaster because it makes him the centre of attention, with people, mostly women at work, wanting to write on his plastercast. “Personal injury is a great conversational gambit” (p. 52). It won’t be the last time that femur is broken.

When the plaster comes off his leg for the first time, he is dismayed.

Compared with the other one, it was all withered and scaly. Mum said it reminded her of me next to Helen in the incubator. (p. 56)

Tony’s twin, Helen, who as clearly always been the favoured sibling, now lives in Australia, and he learns that his parents are selling their house (where he still lives) and moving there to join her. Tony is an almost entirely unsympathetic character, but there seems to be little he can do to escape his predicament, so the reader views him with a mixture of sadness and exasperation. For reasons that may or may not have to do with his birth and upbringing, he has never developed his own personality so has attempted to assemble one, largely from magazine articles and from “knowledge” (p. 47) he harvested from his work in market research.

Tina, the narrator of “I’m Running Late” is so preoccupied with her everyday concerns that she fails to take in the cause of her friend’s distress:

I picked up the phone again. Sandy was still bawling. “… it’s not fair, I only did it once … and you know I can’t stand needles … and oh God hospitals …” I said, “Eh?” I thought, Oh-oh, silly cow’s preggers. (p. 122; ellipses and emphasis original)

Unless I’m missing something,Tina’s solipsistic narrative doesn’t say in terms what is troubling Sandy, but both Constance Straughan’s introduction and the Irish Times review of the first collection say that Sandy is HIV positive. Of course this likelihood would have come to the reader’s mind more immediately in 1993, when the story was first published.

“Gabriel Ascending” is narrated by Andy, an alcoholic who relapses after he misses a couple of AA meetings. He’s been taken to Alcoholics Anonymous by Gabriel, whose real name is is probably Dave (or maybe Mark, Den or Len).

His real name? We called him Gabriel, Gabby, Gabs. For? Descending on drinkers and giving out gyp. Each meeting he’d drag along a new one … (p. 85)

“Gabriel” is a forceful personality who is very effective at getting people to attend meetings.

His method? Simple. He’d spy you quietly sipping or in the act of falling over or catching a kip, sunbathing in the rain, in the park, and then, he would not let you go. (pp. 85–6)

This works on most people but not on Gina, “his live-in love” (p. 86), who has no wish to give up the drink. When Andy, back on the sauce, sees Gabriel lying on a bench in the park, he at first thinks that the latter too has fallen off the wagon and is inclined to gloat. He’s mistaken. though: Gabriel is sick and on some powerful medication. He has been out looking for Gina, who has said she is leaving him. The drunken Andy helps Gabriel home but ends up pouring whiskey down the weakened man’s throat. Gina comes home (apparently to announce again that she’s leaving) but is pleased to find that Gabriel/Dave has been drinking: “You’re back” (p. 93).

The story ends inconclusively, as Andy sinks further into a stupor. Perhaps Gabriel’s illness is terminal and there’s no real point in his trying to stay sober. Maybe he’ll be better off enjoying his final days with the determinedly unsober Gina. On the other hand, probably not.

The final story in this selection, “We Do Not Forward Suicide Notes”, is one of several which sets up a reader’s expectations only to overturn them. It’s set in a cliff-top café by the Atlantic, where a man sits writing on a page taken from his notebook. The only other person in the café is the woman behind the counter, who sits “an acre away” froom him. The café is “vast, dimly lit and derelict” (p. 131) with the tables far apart. It turns out that the man is a danger not to himself but to others, and that the character contemplating suicide is someone else. And there’s an unexpected reference to Samuel Beckett’s short story, “Dante and the Lobster”

 — They scream, she said. It is upsetting but it is over quickly.

 —  Yes, he said. For he did know that.

The lobster screamed once, faintly, like a girl in a park. (p. 136)

Edition: After a Dance, Picador paperback, 2025.