Well-known for her novels, Edna O’Brien has also written many wonderful short stories, several of which can be found online in the New Yorker magazine archives, and any would be an excellent choice here. In this story we’re in Kilburn, one of the districts of London where a lot of Irish immigrants settled. Shovel Kings is the story of Rafferty, an exile to whom neither Ireland nor England is home anymore, a not uncommon theme. The story is told by a visitor who is killing time prior to an appointment and goes into the pub the old building labourer frequents. We are immersed in the life and characters of the pub. She gets into conversation with Rafferty when he says something while picking up a newspaper lying nearby. They talk and a life story unfolds, in its fascinating and moving details. Over a series of visits by the narrator to the same pub prior to recurrent appointments, we learn all about Rafferty. Then we learn that he’s gone, returned to his old town in Ireland. But by the end he comes back to Kilburn. It wasn’t the same home he remembered from all those decades ago. The story gives us an insight into the pub culture of Irish labourers on building sites and the loneliness of an exile in old age.
Collected in Saints and Sinners, Faber, 2011. Available on the New York Times website for subscribers to read, here
A Personal Anthology 