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Aidan Higgins was born in 1927. Langrishe Go Down, his first novel, won the James Tait Black memorial Prize and the Irish Academy of Letters Award, and was later filmed for television with a screenplay by Harold Pinter. His second novel, Balcony of Europe, was shortlisted for the 1972 Booker Prize. The novel Lions of the Grunewald appeared in 1993 and a collection of shorter fiction, Flotsam and jetsam, in 1996. Donkey's Years and Dog Days were the first two volumes of the Higgins Bestiary which concludes with this volume.
A sampler spanning four decades of eminent Irish stylist Higgins's work, these 18 selections (all but two previously published, some under different titles) offer a multifaceted, melancholic view of Europe, past and present, in which skewed passions figure prominently. The title story, an earlier effort, features a middle-aged husband on holiday with his dotty in-laws who, long frustrated by his corpulent wife's coldness, resorts to raping the black maid. Asylum throws together an Irish workingman who's lost the will to work and the alcoholic son of a landowner, taking a cure in order to claim his inheritance. The two play winter golf at a frigid seaside resort, while at night the scion tries to instill his vast education into his companion's thick head. But that head is full of a young chanteuse glimpsed at the local theater, leaving the intellectual talking to himself-which drops him right off the wagon. The aging rake Catchpole, vacationing in Spain in the story bearing his name, recounts endless tales of his gay love life, while eyeing the tight-jeaned prospects from his cafe table and all but ignoring his wife and infant. More recent writings are even more in the travelogue vein, with the sights of Copenhagen the scene for the fractured romance of Helsingor Station, and the mood of Munich as Israeli athletes are killed by terrorists during the '72 Olympics central to Black September. While shaped with consummate skill, the sun doesn't often shine in these stories, making an already hefty tome seem that much heavier. (Kirkus Reviews)
