Author: Louise Kennedy
Title: The End of the World is a Cul de Sac
Year of publication: 2021
Page count: 289
Rating: ★★★★
After loving Kennedy’s stunning debut novel Trespasses, I had to go back and read this collection of fifteen short stories—the first thing she published, almost aged 50, having first picked up a pen after almost thirty years spent as a chef. I’m utterly in awe of how confidently she writes as an emerging new voice, ready to share her life’s wise observations and experience with harsh realism. I came to love it more and more the further I got into it; the stories’ effect seemed to be cumulative, and the whole collection is more than the sum of its parts.
These stark and intimate stories are (mostly) set in the border counties of rural Ireland, and (mostly) concern women who grind through the consequences of their choices—their own, or forced upon them. Marriage and motherhood are the most frequent and devastating themes, yet each sharp-edged, visceral slice-of-life story feels unique and fresh, with Kennedy pulling no punches. There were stand-outs, but every story, subtle yet tense with words unspoken, is worthwhile, painting a portrait of complex, wounded women trapped and limited by their circumstances, yet wild at heart. Some stories have a male protagonist; I found these to be weaker on the whole, albeit no less engaging.
One of those was an early stand-out: Wolf Point explores the relationship between a forester and his five-year-old daughter as he comes to terms with the fact that his young wife, who’s slipping further into mental illness, is an unfit mother. In Imbolc, a pregnant mother comes to regret her decision of suggesting her farmer-husband grow illegal cannabis in the lambing shed for some much-needed extra income, while the only story set outside of Ireland, Beyond Carthage, follows two friends who end up going to a sketchy hammam after being trapped in a Tunisian hotel by incessant rain. Gibraltar shows snapshots of a lifetime of tenderness between a man and the girl he’s accepted as his daughter, even though he knows that she’s the result of his wife’s adultery, and in Powder, a young woman takes his late boyfriend’s American mother on a tour of Ireland to scatter his ashes. These were some of my personal highlights, but for my money, Kennedy saved the best for last: In Garland Sunday, a mature marriage suffers after the joint decision to terminate an unplanned pregnancy.
In virtually all cases, Kennedy merely sets the scene to then end it at a pivotal moment of decision or crisis, leaving the reader to imagine what happens next. Her evocative, dazzling prose provides flashes of beauty, hope, and gallows humor amid cynicism and bleakness; a remarkable new talent to keep an eye on.
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