Plugging the Causal Breach

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Description

The stories in Plugging the Causal Breach explore the lives of a disparate collection of characters from French life. Many live in the shadow of the wonders of historic Paris, others in the villages of Normandy, others still in the French Midi. Here, tellingly brought together, they form the scattered mosaic of a historical puzzle that is far beyond the individual’s grasp.
Some choose to be loners: furniture vendor M. Pierre, the drunken truck driver at the door of a cheap hotel, the sculptor watching his building go up in flames, a depressed estate agent. Others fight something bigger than themselves: Zorica’s trouble with the French administration, the harassment Chantal endures while working within it. There are traces of an older France in stories from Normandy, in the tale of a German ex-POW’s war and his courageous local companion, in the account by a former chateau cook of what may be a rural myth.
These stories depict a lesser-known France, brimming with communicative boldness, resilience, and humor.

Praise for Plugging the Causal Breach

‘A moving, authentic rendering of a life, which becomes extraordinary in its ordinariness. From start to finish, “A Parallel Life” rings with integrity and wisdom.’
– Karen Brennan, judge, Kore Press Award.

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5/5

Lyrical and engaging

Written by Judy Crozier on 1st Dec 2022

On Mary Byrne’s Plugging the Causal Breach A review by Judy Crozier At first it was like approaching music through the breeze, the way it comes and goes, in snatches. Sometimes near sometimes humming like something remembered, and sometimes so suggestive. You move through the night, closer to the light and the music, and you enter. And here are all the people, and here all the music, sometimes almost – but not quite – the same piece, played by a different character. Mary Byrne is Irish and, so obviously, brings to her writing a century or so of literary culture with all that singing Irishness going on. And then she applies it to France. What a unique, thinking and beautiful experience. Her characters, moreover, live in France but move over it as migrants do, especially those with an unfinished history elsewhere. France, she tells us, carries with it the history of a restless Europe. France is many things, and even the French themselves can regard each with suspicion, as strangers: ‘In Paris, they always thought people in the south should be out sunning themselves. ’ Layer upon layer she gives us, with her characters surviving, lost or seeking, and perhaps finding a meaning that may not be there. ‘Plugging the causal breach’, indeed. A story might return to a theme from a previous story, as if we entered it by a different door. such as the tragedy of the foot in the chimney. Music again, dissonant, a theme that returns. An image that leaves both us and Mary’s characters at a loss. A story might be about the realisation of a dream that kills you. Stories about the courage of ordinary people who are, when we look closely, bold and bright and extraordinary, surviving in the midst of transience and the chaos of life. All of these stories have seen a life in a variety of journals, but together, here, they make up a new thing – that music that comes and goes, that winds together and settles, that keens and separates into something altogether new. Lovely stuff.

Plugging the Causal Breach

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