The Mad Road
Laurie Cusack
Roman Books, £12.99

 
SHORT story collections are a minority group in publishing these days. In the drive for high sales’ volumes novels are favoured, to the detriment of shorter works. This new collection, The Mad Road, by Irish debut writer, Laurie Cusack, is rare not only in form but also through its marginality: these are tales of lives that scarcely register in mainstream society, or only in the negative when they do. 

Each story takes the view of the outsider, the man (all are from a male perspective) whose life experience comes the hard way. The collection opens with an Irish bricky talking to his mate in hospital, comatose after an accident on a negligently run construction site. A dilemma hangs over the bricky between doing the right thing, or choosing to survive.  

Such Hobson’s choices are seen in several of the stories. The decision on whether to whistle-blow about the sexual exploitation of two young girls decades after the crime, for instance. This story throws up the spectre of the Irish provincial town with its mean-spirited hypocrisy and generous animosity towards the outsider.

But most of the stories take place in London’s back streets, in 1980s pubs where “on the shovel” Irish workers spend their free time, drinking and listening to the traditional songs that run through the book. Their language and jousting is represented, the rivalries between them that threaten violence. There are glimpses of men who have fallen into abjection through alcoholism, a brief portrait of a “hard man” from the days of the Provos, and there’s a man whose identity as a Traveller is revealed when he makes a mistake at work.

The Mad Road takes the reader through some rough terrain of the Irish diaspora, capturing some of the pathos of lives lived in exile. The absence of a developed female sensibility limits the achievement somewhat. When they are mentioned, the females represented here are less characters than they are punchbags. This contributes to a suspicion of stereotype hanging over the work. 

In fact, far from being minor contributors to the Irish diaspora, more Irish women than men took the mailboat to Holyhead during those decades. Once so prevalent, that particular dispersion is now a disappeared dimension of the relationship between two societies — Ireland’s and Britain’s.

According to the book’s author biography, Laurie Cusack writes of what he knows. After many years of “grafting,” in the UK and on the continent, Cusack achieved a PhD in creative writing from Leicester University. This book of short stories is testament to what appears to be a thriving environment for creative writing. The publishers, Roman Books, edited by Jonathan Taylor, is an interesting addition to the writing community in the Midlands.