Everything in This Country Must - Hardcover

McCann, Colum

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1897580398 ISBN 13: 9781897580394

Publisher: Phoenix House, 2000

Synopsis

One powerful novella, with two thematically linked short stories on either side of it, forms the basis of EVERYTHING IN THIS COUNTRY MUST. Although these are stories about Ireland and the Troubles, they have an almost mythical rather than a political feel. In the title story, four young soldiers help a farmer and his daughter free their horse from a stream in flood, unable to understand that their help will never be anything but an insult. In the novella, 'Hunger Strike', a young boy and his mother flee to Galway as the boy's uncle succumbs to a hunger strike in a Derry gaol. In 'Wood', a ten-year-old boy is asked by his mother to make poles for the marching season.

About this title

Review:

The three teenagers at the heart of Colum McCann's Everything in This Country Must have been fostered alike by beauty and by fear. Since they're from Northern Ireland, alas, the latter gained ground a long time ago. For them, there will always be a better before--before sectarian division and violence rent their families, before illness and death. In the title story, a 15-year-old and her farmer father fight to save his favorite draft horse, which has caught itself in a sudden flood:

The trees bent down to the river in a whispering and they hung their long shadows over the water and the horse jerked quick and sudden and I felt there would be a dying, but I pulled the rope up to keep her neck above water, only just.

As Katie and her father work, quickly, hopelessly, she fills in the gaps: the shame she feels at being slow, how her mother and brother were killed. In her eyes, all nature is alive and witness to the mare's dying, "since everything in this country must"--the connections are everywhere. The connections between humans, however, are not. When six British soldiers, "all guns and helmets," smash through the hedgerow to help, her father would rather sacrifice his horse than be grateful to the enemy. And even after one man risks drowning to rescue the horse, despair at the past destroys the present.

Though there is no overt death in McCann's second story, "Wood," the unsaid and the unsayable cast a pall over another family. After his father has a stroke, Sam and his mother must work by night in the family mill, making poles for banners for a political march. Despite their attempts at silence, the two are discovered, and this time the natural world seems somehow complicit in Ireland's factional wrath: "I looked at the oak trees behind the mill. They were going mad in the wind. The trunks were big and solid and fat, but the branches were slapping each other around like people."

Katie and Sam still have the capacity for wonder that has been worried out of their parents. McCann's third child, however, does not. In "Hunger Strike," a mother and son have gone from north to south for safety, a move that fills the 13-year-old with resentment. One gesture of kindness too many and he'll explode. Much has been made of the fact that in this collection McCann has confronted the Troubles for the first time. Equal attention should be paid to his exquisite, elemental narration--you never know which word will come next, and you're always desperate to find out. --Kerry Fried

About the Author:

Colum McCann was born in Dublin in 1965. His fiction has won numerous international awards including the Rooney Prize, the Ireland Fund of Monaco Princess Grace Memorial Award, a Pushcart Prize, and Esquire magazine's Writer of the Year award in 2003. In 2005 he was nominated for an Oscar for Best Short Film. He was recently inducted into the Hennessy Hall of Fame in Dublin. His work has been published in twenty-six languages. He has travelled widely and is based in New York, where he lives with his wife and children.

About this edition

• Publisher: Phoenix House
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 1897580398
• ISBN 13: 9781897580394
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 143