The Story Teller Could Have Been Spun Better

 

 

The Story Collector (2024)

By Evie Woods

One More Chapter (Harper Collins,) 384 pages.

★★

 

I once attended a talk at Smith College when Kurt Vonnegut was a writer in residence. Students asked him for advice for young writers. He told them that it was important to explain vital things, but cautioned not to over-explain. That advice could have helped The Story Teller.

 

Evie Woods is the pen name of Evie Gaughan. She lives in Ireland, the setting of The Story Collector, which was originally published in 2018. It's a tale within a tale that jumps between 1910 and 2010. Sarah Harper is about to leave her three-year marriage and take temporary refuge in Boston with her overbearing sister. Sarah drinks too much, staggers onto the wrong plane, falls asleep, and awakes as she is about to land in Shannon. Huh? She didn’t need a passport to fly to Boston and how does a drunken woman make it through customs?

 

She's a mess and knows it, but decides to stay in Erin to sort out her emotional distress and her lack of future plans. Luckily she encounters a kindly bus driver who helps her get oriented and find a place to stay in Ennis. Everyone is nice to her except widowed conservation office officer Oran Sweeney even though she's a clueless Yank who knows nothing about County Clare. Sarah gets the lowdown about early 19^th century Thornwood House and why the motorway mysteriously goes around it. It seems to have something to do with cnoc na sí, the hill of the fairies, though locals only half believe in said supernatural beings. As Sarah settles into the wintry land and walks a lot–how else to secure the wine she guzzles on the sly?–she chances upon an old diary hidden in a tree.

 

This is the hook for the Wayback chapters that spotlight 18-year-old Anna Butler and her family. The book’s namesake character is Harold Griffin-Krauss, an American reading anthropology for an Oxford PhD on fairy beliefs. He hires Anna to be his regional contact for setting up interviews. The Butlers are reluctant to allow Anna to travel with Harold, but she's bright, responsible, and the farmstead needs the extra money she earns. Harold's a complete gentleman, quite unlike twin siblings George and Olivia Hawley, the rich, privileged heirs to Thornwood House. As it fittingly transpires, Thornwood and the Hawley family are cursed. Do the fairies have a role in that?

 

It should be noted that story collecting was a real thing. The study of folklore and social anthropology came into their own in the early 20th century. As industrialism, urbanization, and modernism proved transformative, scholars combed the countryside to analyze disappearing traditions. In similar fashion, “song catchers” went into European villages and the Appalachians to trace the origins of folk songs.

 

Woods employs a forth-and-back [sic] narrative structure that parallels the lives of Sarah and Anna; that is, if we broadly interpret trauma, pluck, and confusion about relationships. In both time periods Woods suggests that proper matches are a mix of luck and magic. Overall, Anna's tale is much more compelling than Sarah's. Anna is a young woman forced to grow up, whereas Sarah is an adult who struggles/refuses to do so. Though one can sympathize with Sarah’s misfortunes and allegiance to the bottle, she's essentially awaiting a rescuing knight in shining armor.

 

The Story Collector is thus an awkward hybrid that's not quite a slice of Irish life, not quite a romance, and not quite magical realism. This perhaps explains the novel’s uneven tone. In all candor, at times it read like a YA novel. Why do modern-day residents of Ennis act more like Americans than Irishmen? Does anyone need a character explain where the Celtic lands are located? (Surely most contemporary readers could at least name Scotland, Ireland, and Wales.) Aside from stereotypical foodways and fairies, this story could have taken place in the pine barrens where the Jersey devil is said to roam, or in the Pacific Cascades where Bigfoot is alleged to reign.

 

Tonal shifts and obvious contrivances notwithstanding, The Story Collector is easy reading and has delightful moments. I suspect it will have an audience, but to me it seemed more a treatment for a novel than a finished product.

 

Rob Weir