Bernard MacLaverty's stories free us from the present

THERE is a certain pleasure to be gained from a volume of collected stories by a writer you admire but have so far read only piecemeal.

THERE is a certain pleasure to be gained from a volume of collected stories by a writer you admire but have so far read only piecemeal. Following the chronological progression by which most collections are arranged is like watching a stop-motion film of a plant coming into flower.

When it comes to literature, however, development of talent is not the same as self-improvement. Forget that gradual concentration of traits and beliefs that grown-ups supposedly possess, a kind of crystallisation into adulthood. Writing is not a case of gathering attitudes or ideas or subjects into some final, worldly fixity. Instead, creative maturity for the author is marked by the ability to melt reality back into its base elements, into fiction's dream-like solution.

This creative deliquescence is pronounced in the stories of Irish writer Bernard MacLaverty. Admittedly his earliest efforts, gathered in Secrets (1977), begin timidly. It is not that they aren't fine - that miraculous ear for the rhythm and cadence of Irish speech and the startling colloquial turns of which it is capable were hardwired in his prose from the get-go - but the stories remain wedded to the ordinary: to plain anecdote and semi-autobiographical episode.

Then something happens. Here is the opening of Between Two Shores, which appears halfway through that debut volume and is the first story not set in Northern Ireland:

It was dark now and he sat with his knees tucked up to his chin, knowing that there was a long night ahead of him. He had arrived early for the boat and sat alone in a row of seats wishing he had brought a paper or magazine of some sort. He heard a noise like a pulse from somewhere deep in the boat. Later he changed his position and put his feet on the floor.

It is that old story: the Irishman who leaves his wife and children to work in England. But this time MacLaverty adds a further dimension. The man has had an affair with a New Zealand nurse, a liberated bluestocking. From her he contracted a venereal disease for which he failed to seek treatment, so terrified is he of the pain and shame that would accompany a cure. The story follows the movements of his mind during the ferry crossing to Belfast, thoughts that pitch, yaw and roll along with the vessel's passage.

Should he admit his sin? Should he disappear into a new life? Should he commit suicide? All these heavy possibilities are nonetheless interspersed with more prosaic impulses: whether to talk to a pretty young woman reading a book, or how to politely evade the parents with a Down syndrome daughter sitting opposite him. The desire to order a pint of stout or smoke another cigarette is given equal billing with animal panic, choking guilt. And so the piece ends, resolved only in its irresolution:

If only he could close his eyes and sleep and forget. His life was over. Objects on the shore began to become distinct through the mist. Gasometers, chimney stacks, railway tracks. They looked washed out, a putty grey against the pale lumps of the hills. Cars were moving and then he made out people hurrying to work. He closed his eyes and put his head down in his arms. Indistinctly at first, but with growing clarity, he heard the sound of an ambulance.

That ending, with its chilling, Larkinesque flourish, registers a new depth of understanding in MacLaverty's work. Throughout four subsequent collections, from A Time to Dance (1982) to Matters of Life and Death (2006), he refines a sense of life as something that bleeds over a story's last sentence. The author sinks ever deeper into the consciousness of his creations, tracing thought and perception in its shifting - movements as graceful and inexplicable as the sudden tacking of a flight of swallows.

Take the standout piece from his next collection, My Dear Palestrina, in which a handsome young boy is sent to piano lessons with an European emigre, a Miss Schwartz, washed up in the suburbs of Northern Ireland during the 1960s. She recognises his beauty and his talent, and she encourages his studies with increasing fervour.

As the years pass the love of classical music she inculcates in him becomes a register for his nascent maturity - a mark of his growing difference. The boy is just entering adolescence when the teacher becomes pregnant out of wedlock to an unknown party and his mother breaks off the lessons. Thus a fragile, dawning individualism is dashed against the provincial certitude of parents and wider community:

"Mein Lieber, in the light the pale people see nothing. The glare blinds them. It is easy to hurt what you cannot see. To drop bombs a million miles away." She stopped talking and pointed her finger straight at him. "One of your popes had a great thing to say once. He had been listening to some music by Palestrina with Palestrina himself. He said to him, 'The law, my dear Palestrina, ought to employ your music to lead hardened criminals to repentance.' Do you think this," and she hissed out the s sound, "this town would do this to me if they had truly heard one bar of Palestrina?"

Note how the ironies multiply here, for Miss Schwartz, a woman whose religious background is not referred to but whose name suggests Jewish outsiderdom, is making an argument that (if we recall those who adored Schubert yet ran concentration camps) history has blown to smithereens.

It is as if the story, with its startling compression of time and event, its rhyming symbolism of image, sound and idea, its subtle equation of music with sexuality, its compassion and its anger, was using every tool in the author's armory to question the efficacy of art. Yet, by so clearly and elegantly enunciating this scepticism, MacLaverty's story becomes the opposite of the Nazis' callous, hollow passion for the arts.

The wonder of the newly published Collected Stories is that the stories only get better as they go on. There is no loss of originality and no recourse to old material that does not find in those leavings something fresh to say. By the time we get to his most recent collection, Matters of Life and Death, the author has relaxed into an easy humour, one that only highlights a seriousness that the collection's title simultaneously ironises and admits.

In one story we meet a man reading Chekhov in the waiting room of a hospital clinic, about to give blood and urine samples that will reveal if he has diabetes. Distracted and uncomfortable, he nevertheless finds himself drawn into a short story called The Beauties. MacLaverty writes:

He was struck again by the power of the word. Here he was - about to be told he had difficult changes to make to his life and yet by reading words on a page, pictures of Russia a hundred years ago come into his head ... It was so immediate, the choice of words so delicately accurate, that they blotted out the reality of the present.

The Clinic is a tale about the potential of language to free us from the present moment. It sucks us into MacLaverty's world, just as his narrator is drawn into Chekhov's. Its 13 pages are a modest declaration of the worth of the short story that could apply to every piece in this collection.

Collected Stories
By Bernard Maclaverty
Jonathan Cape, 640pp, $52.95 (HB)

Geordie Williamson is The Australian's chief literary critic.