‘Karl was a man of the gentlest contour. He seemed biggest just under the ribcage, above the bellybutton, as if he were carrying not fat but a thick band of protein, the legacy of sixty years of baked pork chops for dinner.’
In the autumn issue of the Dublin Review, Fiachra Kelleher makes his first appearance in the magazine with a sparkling long story about what happens when a young English film producer, ostensibly on sabbatical in a Connemara village, starts to take a strong interest in the life, utterances and doings of the titular butcher (who is also a horse breeder, fuel merchant, property manager and flannel importer). Narrated by Gary, who was a nineteen-year-old shop assistant when the events of the story unfolded, ‘The Butcher’s Horses’ is at once a study in youthful longing, a portrait of the workings of a rural village, and an exploration of what happens when people become characters in dramas conceived by others.
Also in the autumn issue, Ian O’Donnell presents the oral-history testimonies of four minor offenders coming to the end of minor sentences in Mountjoy Prison. ‘Four Prisoners’ shows the futility of the revolving door by which people who come from poverty and struggle with addiction end up imprisoned at the state’s considerable expense, then released back onto the streets, receiving little or no treatment or support and, as often as not, offending again.
William Keohane’s ‘The Assessments’ is a brilliantly observed account of the process by which he sought to access gender-affirming testosterone treatment. It is a companion piece to ‘Lake Ontario’ (DR 92), in which Keohane wrote about the experience of top surgery; and like the earlier essay it is a beautifully calm, controlled, suggestive piece of prose.
The autumn Dublin Review also features four other superb pieces of fiction: Katie Curran’s Lynchian ‘Discland’, in which a recovering alcoholic gets a job in a shop and becomes a regular in a restaurant, neither of which have any customers; Peter Gordon’s ‘Rouen’, about a man making what might be his final visit to his elderly mother; Sorcha Hamilton’s ‘Madwoman’, in which a young mother, having had her car repossessed, is forced to recall the way her father’s debts shaped her childhood; and Beth Kilkenny’s darkly comic ‘My Whole Self’, about an administrative assistant who takes a strong interest in a glamorous colleague.
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