Review: Deadly Confederacies and other stories

Deadly Confederacies and other stories. Martin Malone. Short Stories.

It's a truism that in writing you should write from where you know, writes Brian Byrne. And since I come from the same county as Martin Malone, and also have known him for years, I can relate to many reflections of Kildare and its people in these stories. But there are also many set in the parts of north Africa and the Middle East where Malone served with Irish peacekeeping forces during his army career. These do not echo any part of my own background, and therefore perhaps I was able to read them with more objectivity.

You could read this collection as a sort of chronology in a couple of ways. I had the sense that the stories run in a sequence from when they were written, as they certainly matured from the first through the last. Or they might represent the author's probing of life through ages, as the early ones recall boyhood, the latter peruse old age. As far as I can recall, all are written in the first person, but the narrator's name changes in most. A couple have the same first person, in sequel.

There's a familiar one halfway through — the story that became the first chapter of Malone's rivetting novel 'The Valley of the Peacock Angel'. I understand this, a short story that stands perfectly well on its own but which eventually insists that it be allowed to become something more.

These are good stories. Some very good, as any collection will have its favourites. On the whole they are not happy ones. Nothing wrong with that, life is as we see it, and none of us live in the proverbial bed of roses, which anyhow has its own nasty thorns. But 'Confederacies' is often bedded in clumps of nettles, and Malone is not afraid to show the welts and bruises, and worse, we sometimes inflict on ourselves and on each other. It is life, and injury, and death, in raw and naked, and sometimes unfinished states.

In fairness, when I'd read the first couple of stories soon after buying the book, I wasn't inclined to rush to the rest. As it was an e-book, I left it for picking up on my Kindle app at another time, in a different humour. But when I did get back into the collection just recently, it became quite addictive, and I finished it in a very few sessions.

Being a writer myself, I don't try and analyse an author's own personality and history through the stories he or she writes. But anyone who does will have an interesting time with this collection. Even if any conclusions are probably well off the mark. You may well, though, get the feeling that Martin Malone has been never more comfortable than when he was a peacekeeper. In his picking out details of the life he and his comrades had, or in working through the characteristics of the local people with whom he obviously established a strong rapport.

Whether delving into subjects from home or abroad, personal or public, far past or fairly present, Martin Malone shows in this collection the same kind of understanding of the human condition that underpins his considerable body of work to date, in print, on radio and on the stage.

And the good thing, I believe he still has a lot more to say.