A Close Shave with the Devil

‘The devil was going around again and everyone knew because it was in the papers. An usherette in the Metropole saw him at An Apartment for Peggie, eating oranges in a brown trilby; two women in Clery’s Bargain Basement came upon him fingering cups in a highly suspicious manner; and The Evening Mail said pretty draper’s assistant, Lily Shine, nineteen, from Cabra West, was dancing with a fellow in a brown suit when she felt something funny, looked down, and fainted.’

In these unsettling tales of late 1940s Dublin, young Eily Doolin encounters the gentle foot-fetishist next door, the ‘Argentinian tango-dancer’ from Ballybough, the Jewish couple who introduce her to the delights of carrot cake and Chopin, the ‘simple’ boy who carries a secret hatred, and, in the climactic closing story, the devil himself. Along the way there are two murders, a suicide, and more illicit sex than Eily can comprehend.

Ena May’s post-Emergency Dublin is at once recognizable and utterly unlike all previous literary versions of the city. Her gimlet-eyed narrator inhabits secret childhood places as well as the grown-up kitchens and parlours of ‘Blarney Park’, twitching the veil between public and private, street and home. Ena May has created a remarkable narrative voice, perfectly pitched between the knowing and the naïve, the compassionate and the sarcastic, the intrepid and the bewildered. A Close Shave with the Devil, fables of adults at play in a child’s world, is a tour de force of storytelling, and a remarkable début collection.