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Like many people, I came to Lucy Caldwell in 2021 when 'All the People Were Mean and Bad' won the BBC Short Story Award, and so I read her previous collections, Multitudes and Intimacies, in one go. Openings is the first one I've had to wait for -- but also one I've come to after using those first two books (published five years apart) to build myself a sense of her fictive world, her voice, her concerns, and so on. In a sense, Openings is not just a collection in its own right to me, but the next stage of someone's weltanshauung: I was almost holding my breath as I began it, waiting to see how she'd developed. And I knew I would be disappointed if she hadn't.

Multitudes and Intimacies each had a tight narrative focus: although they were story collections, they felt cohesive, like a concept album. Multitudes was gathered around female coming-of-age, Intimacies was about the psyche in the maelstrom of new motherhood; Openings, from this perspective, felt at first almost scattershot. Here was a story about covid lockdowns, here a magic realist tale about a grandmother becoming a tree, here a postmodern historical metanarrative, here a tightly-timed domestic drama about a young woman entering possible stepmotherhood. Within these, though there are shared concerns, it's more that they feel like repeated themes - motifs in a piece of music - than like honed, focalised 'subject matter', as they did in Caldwell's previous collections. And while I found the collection harder to get into at first because of this, as it went on, and with re-reading, I've come to see it as the result of an opening for, or from, Lucy Caldwell herself, into a broader creative world.

Caldwell is especially concerned, here, with women reaching early middle-age as they leave the contained chaos of toddlers and babies, and enter the more nuanced, emotionally discursive space of children -- arguments between siblings, between kids and adults, a sense of a child's self fixing and plateauing, and that child stepping out from the shadow of the mother into being a separate, at times unknowable, being. At this stage, the mothers in Caldwell's work now find themselves on a brink, or a border, looking both ways: they look back at their mothers, and at themselves as children, and reconsider what they thought was happening when they were young; they become children and adults at once, parents and daughters, each informed by the other - double-selves in flux as the memory of the former child-self, and the former mother, and the positions of the current self and current child, influence one another.

The stories do this subtly, in ways that require patience and re-reading. I knew something was up when both the collection's first story, 'If You Lived Here, You'd Be Home by Now', and title story, 'Openings', both left me initially cold. But where you start and what you name the whole thing after -- surely they must matter? So I went back to them. And slowly the images, the patterning, Caldwell's quiet way of using a small incident to stand in for the unspoken emotional resonance of the story's undercurrent, all began to reveal themselves. In one, a mother of young children, separated from her own mother by distance, sickness and the pandemic, collects a kitten from the neighbour and sees the drama of separation and reunion played out between the mother and baby. (The quietness with which Caldwell gives us this reunion, the delicacy with which the narrator observes it, and what she doesn't think in that moment, all mean the symbol wasn't immediately obvious to me.) In the other, a mother in the unsure space of marital separation, on the last day before the children go to their father's, has "one of those days" where everything slips from its moorings, and she has to forcibly enter into this looseness and reconsider her new self, an escape from a set of conditions that she didn't wholeheartedly choose for herself. Both of these stories, on first reading, feel slightly ephemeral, and even dissatisfying -- there are images that come and go, no particular tight plot but rather a series of incidents that don't even seem to escalate, and people who enter the story for a few lines of dialogue and leave again. And while these qualities don't necessarily feel like the more tightly schematic "well-made story" of some of her earlier works, I ended up admiring them more, and admiring how philosophical Caldwell was willing to get within such (supposedly) prosaic surroundings.

(Another interesting theme running through the collection is the appearance of Northern Ireland not as a nation or a political identity, but as mood and a culture; as an environment of landscape and language and weather and personal interaction. Caldwell drops in words like "guldered", "drookit" and "wee", she writes of sea wind and briny rain and Belfast streets where the people shift between kindness and guarded humour, in a way that's very evocative. It's interesting to me that her earlier books did this less: the "London Irish" in 'Intimacies' don't feel drawn with as much investment as they do here. I don't know enough about the situation but I do wonder if we're watching Northern Irish fiction in general wrestle with an identity that, for those who grew up in the 80s and 90s, was highly politicised and black-and-white, something to be defended or abandoned, and who now have the distance to ask what they've lost, what they might want back, and are trying to capture the place differently while reassessing their relationship with it.)

For me the two strongest stories - the big-hitters, most clearly ambitious and emotionally wrenching - are 'Daylight Raids' and 'Bibi'. The former is a story of the Blitz and WW2 in London, some of it feeling very much like it comes out of Elizabeth Bowen's 'Mysterious Kor' and how Bowen writes Regent's Park at the start of 'The Death of the Heart'. But Caldwell plays with perspective and perception from the off, peeling back the layers of drama to explore historical research, how and why we tell stories, what can be made of what it available. Caldwell herself, or an authorial "I" that might be constructed, narrates 'Daylight Raids', commenting not just on the characters but on the story's progression - both in terms of the real-time dramatic space and its process of being imagined, written, drafted. 'Bibi' is the story that feels closest in tone and outlook to 'All the People Were Mean and Bad', the story of a woman in her earliest thirties, on holiday with her older, still quite new, boyfriend, and his three daughters, whose mother passed away five years ago. It's a masterpiece of withheld and revealed information, raising questions in the reader's mind and answering them at just the right emotionally impactful moment; sending the not-stepmother to an inescapable crescendo where she must truly ask what her position is with this family, and then, at the end, finding a beautiful, surprising way to develop the questions it raises and bring the protagonist to an open-ended resolution. For me it's the best story in the collection, and probably the best story of Caldwell's career so far.

There are a couple of stories I wasn't quite so taken with even on a second reading - in a book of almost 250 pages (the last two collections were more like 150 pages each) this seems inevitable - and I didn't think there needed to be thirteen stories (both previous books had eleven). But the overall strengths far outweigh the occasional weakness of a story that makes you shrug, and it's good to see one of the UK's foremost short fiction writers developing her stories in interesting new ways, finding new depths and wisdom in its changing form.