As it comes again it is a cry that seems to drain colour from everything around him.

He is struck with a feeling deeper than fright.

A high dense cry and then a drawn-out sound, a choked sound like something wanting to become words but unable to find them. He hears what must be a bird or an animal even tangled in something, but no, birds don’t grieve like that. The way O’Sullivan finally steps into the historical crisis moment for Andrew is arrestingly skillful: the prose zeroes in, becoming highly visual, also full of assonance and internal rhyme: For Andrew, the protagonist, the cyclical return of memory is so disabling that he almost has to schedule in periods of breakdown throughout his career. A tale both of tragic religious mania and marital infidelity, it also exposes the difference between gossip – where events become a yarn to spin, a comic turn for the local community – and the reality of lived trauma, “the woundings of time”. ‘Good Form’, with its shadowy, laconic, yet prideful and supercilious father, slowly circles in to a central event in a brother and sister’s farm upbringing. O’Sullivan’s short fictions play with various time schemes: some travel an upwards, ever tightening arc of chronological narrative suspense others, like ‘Good Form’, the first in the collection, telescope in and out of past and present, gradually spiralling in to crushing revelation. In the novella, not only is there a similar novel’s-lode of insight, but also a bittersweet distillation and dramatisation of philosophical views and a limber, imaginative leap into a castaway narrative in its final section. In each story, there is a novel’s worth of observation and nuance, flecked with the glinting mica of poetry and a cast of clear, distinct characters. But of course, this is Vincent O’Sullivan, Mansfield scholar and literary polymath, so I should have known that those stories would mock my wish to skimp and skip. Emma Neale, something of a literary polymath herself, reviews Vincent O’Sullivan’s new short story collection Mary’s Boy, Jean-Jacques.Ĭonfession: I started this collection wanting to race through the first six stories, to get to the novella and discover just exactly what the author had done with the tortured creature from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

Chords to i see the light tangled