A Cruelty by Kevin Barry, 2012
The magic trick:
A seemingly straightforward story
In many ways, “A Cruelty” is a very straightforward story. A man takes the train every morning to feed the ducks downtown. He relies on repetition and predictability of the most minute details to comfort him; maybe even sustain him. A creepy, cruel man disrupts his routine by harassing and assaulting him. Our protagonist escapes and takes the train back home, shaken to his core.
Unlike most short stories we feature here, there doesn’t appear to be a second or third level of narrative or thematic vibration. It really appears to be a single-track train (if you will, to reference the story’s setting).
But I find that I enjoy that very much. The result is that the story lets go of control and provides the reader the opportunity to fill the space with their own thoughts and feelings. It reminds me of what someone (the first drummer?) said about the Ramones; to badly paraphrase: the repetition of simple chords over and over make the listener hear phantom harmonies in their head. The music isn’t filling all the gaps; it’s setting the template for the listener.
And that’s quite a trick on the Ramones’s part (and Barry).
The selection:
Why, Donie demands, when the train has had a full eight minutes to wait on the platform, can it not leave precisely at the appointed time of its schedule?
‘There is no call for it,’ he says.
And it is not as if his watch is out–no fear–for he checks it each morning against the speaking clock. The speaking clock is a state-run service; it surely cannot be wrong. If it was, the whole system would be thrown out.
The train climbs to the high ground outside Boyle. He rides the ascent into the Curlew mountains, and he whistles past the graveyard. The judder and surge of the engine is its usual excitement and he tries to forget the anxiety of Boyle station, but it recedes slowly as tide. Now the broken-down stone walls of the old rising fields. Now the mournful cows still wet from the dew and night’s drizzle. Now the greenish tone of the galvanised tin roof on the lost shack. The spits of rain against the window, and the high looming of the Bricklieves on a mid-distant rise, north-westerly, a smooth-cut limestone plateau.
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