Wairarapa Times Age - Review by Mick Ludden (March 2008)
In this writer’s first collection of short stories (an Irish emigrant of 12 years in New Zealand), there’s a strong painterly way with words that takes you to the places and situations even if you’re occasionally left wondering with a feeling of “well, what am I doing here?”
Snatched moments of lust and surges of romantic pain and bereavements abound as do chilly nights, lonely wanderings, jaded machinations, tawdry affairs, Kafkaesque frustrations and grim humour, tanks be to God.
Settings are important (but some hard to locate) and range from Galway to Lille, Donegal, Paris, Sussex, Wellington and London – chilly winds, mist and post-coital cigarettes all over the show, to be sure.
I appreciated many of his descriptions, mist through a train window and the way foggy days and nights can transport you into another kind of reality The last story, Morris Dancing, is a neat twist on our supposedly benign colonisation process (no Union Jacks on London bridge, pai kare!) and is a fine ending to the author’s fine beginning.