Life Here Below

A dippy photographer shoots talking donkeys and invisible strangers. A professor who in his youth vowed to kill Ian Paisley has so far failed to do so. A brash young journalist wants the local paper to save the world, but the editor prefers football. Only a thin veil separates the world we think we know from the other universe we suspect. Does a son always know his father and vice versa? When a large old duffer gets stuck in Newgrange, can love provide a way out? Why can't the future be obvious as the past? Michael J. Farrell insists his stories are what people brood over in the small hours until some see the light. What they see is the fragile earth redeemed time and again by surprises. Ballinasloe may seem an odd beginning of the end of George W. Bush. A saintly old archbishop and a worldly new bishop climb Croagh Patrick together, ecclesiastical chalk and cheese each in search of a different end of the rainbow. New arrivals find one astronaut too many at the International Space Station. Life here below, Farrell contends, would be a dire place without insights and epiphanies and, of course, porter.