The Shortest Day
By Colm Tóibín
Archaeologist Michael O’Kelly (1915 – 1982), known to his friends as “Brian”, will remain best known for leading the excavation and restoration of the Late Stone Age passage tomb of Newgrange in the Boyne Valley, County Meath in Ireland. It was O’Kelly who, on December 21, 1967 – the day of the winter solstice and, therefore, the “shortest day of the year” – discovered that the rays of the sun on the midwinter sunrise pass through a small opening above the tomb’s doorway, lighting up the passage up to the centre of the chamber. This finding confirmed legends in the area which alluded to this phenomenon. It let O’Kelly to comment that “the people who built Newgrange built not just a tomb but a house of the dead, a house in which the spirits of special people were going to live for a long time”.
Colm Tóibín’s short story The Shortest Day is, essentially, a fictionalised account of O’Kelly’s discovery. It alternates between descriptions of the archaeologist’s preparations for his midwinter trip to Newgrange, and dialogues between the spirits inhabiting the tomb who are worried about the potential consequences should their “secret” be discovered. It is a concern which is shared by the locals, who do their best to thwart O’Kelly’s plans through ruses which border on the cartoonish.
I was drawn to this story because its blurb had a folk-horrorish vibe to it, and I am always intrigued when the horror genre is approached by a writer not typically associated with it. The work, however, turned out to be quite different from my expectations: a poetic meditation about life, death and collective memory and about what remains of us, both as individuals and as a community, after we pass on. The story is well-written, and I would not expect less from an author of Tóibín’s calibre. However, I must confess I did not find it particularly memorable.
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| Newgrange. Photo taken from travel blog https://josephsjourneyjournal.wordpress.com/tag/newgrange/ |
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