Repeat This and You're Dead

R.G. Moyles is a professor of English at the University of Alberta, and
the co-author of Imperial Dreams and Colonial Realities: British Views
of Canada, 1880–1914.

Short stories? Vignettes? “Portraits,” the cover blurb calls them,
and that will certainly do. For what Lawrence Russell does here, so
reminiscent of the best writing of Frank O’Connor, is paint verbal
miniatures of the Irish personality—a personality shaped by social
insecurity and largely by a fascination with and fear of death. Almost
every relationship, every social encounter, every family get-together,
is somehow rendered suspicious or sinister by a lurking fear of reprisal
or pain. And therefore, though these “portraits” are so skilfully
done, so rooted in the actual, so aesthetically satisfying, they have an
air of sadness and a brooding sense of futility that make them linger in
your imagination long after you have read them. “When you look at
Ireland today,” says one of Russell’s storytellers, “what with all
its killings and unemployment, and compare it to what it was like when I
was just a cub who couldn’t keep his nose clean, it’s enough to make
you weep.” And yet the story he tells of “The Bomb” (just a hoax,
it seems) has the same violent overtones as later “real” bombings.
So the naiveté is pitiful. “Things are different now, though. You
heard about the bomb in that church in Enniskillen? It killed
twenty-seven people, most of them women and children. It was terrible,
just terrible. Aye, it’s a lot different now. Back then, you see, we
were just pretending.” As were most of the personalities Russell
portrays. But more human because of that. Because pretending and
pretension are such universal human habits, in Ireland and out. And
Russell is well worth reading for his portraits of the human condition.
A wise and crafty writer.