A grim and haunting land

Set in the rural boarder towns in the north of Ireland, “Heaven Lies About Us” is a collection of short stories linked by a brutal and haunting tone. Glasgow-born fiction writer Eugene McCabe (“Death and Nightingales”) utterly nails the timbre and heartbreak of Ireland, that divided land scarcely one-fifth the size of California that was once characterized by W.B. Yeats as “a terrible beauty.” Tying together the past with the present, McCabe explores Ireland and her people in very intimate stories, creating a kaleidoscope of tales that sets into context the tragic and soul-rending struggles that continue there to this day. Violence, hatred, religious fanaticism and class warfare form the locus of his stories, with glimpses of genuine faith and compassion leavening the grim narratives just enough to make them bearable.

The book begins in the recent era, marked by bloodshed between the Irish Republican Army and the Ulster Defense Regiment and hatred between Catholics and Protestants, then moves back and forth in time to the mid-1800s and the scandalous poverty and starvation of the potato famine (exacerbated by the policies of the occupying British), in which the population of Ireland was decimated.

In McCabe’s tales, though, there’s no one place to lay blame. All have blood on their hands, all are victims and oppressors, all suffer horribly in this life. And God, in his heaven, watches on.

“How can anyone look about the world and believe in a God? How can anyone look about the world and not believe in a God?” one character wonders, delineating the contradiction between faith and despair that shapes the book’s core. “Is it some cruel game He’s playing up there? [Leap] at the stars and break your neck?”

The title story tells of Marion, a young girl being sexually molested by her supposedly perfect older brother and of her attempts to get help by confessing to an uncle, who is a priest. The piety of Marion’s mother renders her blind to her daughter’s suffering, although it’s taking place before her very eyes. In “Heritage,” a young Protestant man joins the Ulster Defense Regiment at his mother’s urging -- “ ‘I’ll not ... hear a son of mine called ‘coward’ ” -- and learns more about the hatred and atrocities in his own family than he can endure.

“Victims” features an oddly paired group of IRA followers as they kidnap the members of a wealthy landowning Protestant family. Both sides are holed up in the family’s house for a period of hours in which readers come to see the opposing parties as equal in their victimhood. “[A] wonder and a pity when you think of the men and women who died for them crooked hedges, ditches and lanes, the blood, the hunger, the burials, the sorrow.” Still, the struggle continues. As one of the kidnappers puts it, the conflict is “ugly, very very ugly, and we’ll keep it ugly till it’s over.”

A quartet of powerful tales makes up the book’s ending, telling of the potato famine from four different perspectives: There’s a 17-year-old Catholic girl surviving after her twin sister dies in childbirth; the girls’ mother, who loses her mind and is locked up in the “idiot ward” ; the master of the poorhouse who straddles the line between the Catholicism of his birth and the Protestantism of the adopted family that raised him; and the Protestant landowner who is beseeched for help by the starving tenants on his land.

The poorhouse master convinces the landowner that “emigrating tenant paupers to America at five pounds a head was cheaper than keeping them in the poorhouse at four pounds a year. By buying passage he’d be free of the swarming cottiers, squatters and ditch beggars who couldn’t pay rent and were, in any case, half starving because of the blight. He would benefit, they would benefit. The scheme was a huge success till the black tide of sea burials came floating back to haunt every family in the country.”

Throughout the calamities limned by McCabe, belief in God and belief in human decency struggle for breath. Two brothers, long-standing bachelors living together, hold conflicting views. “Religion puts people mad,” one brother contends. “No religion puts them madder,” his brother retorts. McCabe makes manifest this opposition, exploring it throughout his stories with a keen ear, sharp descriptions and spot-on dialogue. It’s no coincidence, one character implies, that in the Irish language, the word “kill” (as in Killarney and many other place names) translates as “church.”

McCabe’s title, readers come to see, is a double-entendre. Heaven may indeed surround us with its glories and beauty, but the other perspective -- that heaven and the divine presence are mendacious in relation to humans, especially the Irish -- seems equally correct. “Win or lose nothing changes, because men don’t nor women.... even the blind know that light leads on to darkness.” Like the land Yeats characterized so aptly, McCabe’s “Heaven Lies About Us” is, in every aspect, a work of “terrible beauty.”