["A Cow in the House"] contains the stories of a man talking easily, of a man whose memories crowd in on him, some merry, some melancholy, but all demanding attention, so that their appearance on the page seems at times to follow an order dictated by the random operations of change, and inconsequentiality seems the ruling principle of life. Memories of lost days of youth in rural Ireland, the Ireland of small towns and small farms where "Edwardian days lasted until 1939", and life moved slowly; rules of logic only falsify such memories and the stories drift along, remembered experiences and people conniving with their invented counterparts to create a fiction which makes the reader say, not "Life could never have been like that", but "That is just how life would be remembered"; and if the emphasis is on tolerance and neighbourliness, it is not because memory is up...