Tales That Make You Think - Rob Olsen - The Wellingtonian (April 2007)
There’s nothing quite like a good short story. Something that pulls you in, churns your mind around and spits you out the other end … thinking about what you’ve just read.
Wellington author Brian O’Sullivan offers 13 yarns in his first book The Irish Muse and Other Stories. Overall he achieves that feeling. Most of his stories left me wondering about the characters, their lives and experiences. A couple were ordinary.
It’s fiction tinged with a bit of real life experience, set in Wellington, Ireland and France amongst other places. The stories range from chance romantic encounters in a small Irish town and haunting tales of tragic personal loss to bizarre encounters between a consultant and a career woman in Wellington and one man’s attempt to get to the bottom of his internet service woes. The finale was a thought-provoking tale that upended my perception of indigenous people’s land grievances, oddly entitled ‘Morris Dancing’. My favourite is Sleepwalking in English, a story about a man’s attempts to come to grips with the death of his partner in a car crash – the ending was eerie.
It’s a simply written, easy to read book that you can devour in a night if the mood takes you. It’s said that you can’t judge a book by its cover. Au contraire, I liked the look of O’Sullivan’s book and the content proved to be good.