Review of Dorothy Macardle, “A Story Without an End (For N.C.)” in A Brilliant Void: A Selection of Classic Irish Science Fiction, edited by Jack Fennell (Tramp Press, 2018): 225-230 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology).
This is a story designed to intrigue before one even reads the first word. How can one write a story without an end? Who is N.C.? And what is the significance of the note following the author’s name in the table of contents: “Mountjoy Gaol, December 1922”?
The latter question is answered in Fennell’s brief introductory notes to the story. In December 1922, Macardle was in prison for Anti-Treaty activities (the treaty in question being the Anglo-Irish treaty that split the Irish island into Northern Ireland and the Irish Free State). When Fennell picked this particular tale for the collection, he could not have known just how important the ramifications of that treaty would be, just a few years shy of a century later, as the question of the “Irish backstop” plagues the British government as it tries to extract the United Kingdom from the European Union.
All that, before we even read the first word! The story opens, not in Ireland as one might expect, but in Philadelphia, where Nesta McAllister has recently arrived to join her husband Roger. She is a quiet woman, not accustomed to grandiose speech, but there comes a night when in the company of a circle of friends she speaks of dreams that she has had, dreams that have come true. Then she speaks of another dream she’s had, one of which has only partially come true, and which she fears the future will someday bring the second half.
The “story without an end” ends quite simply, on a precipice of fear for the future. But it also does not end, because the Irish troubles did not end with the treaty, or the civil war that followed, and even now, a century later, still plague us. What would Macardle have made of that?
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