Category: Irish literature

Long Island by Colm Tóibín

Irish writer Colm Tóibín, Laureate for Irish Fiction 2022-2024. This is his eleventh novel.

As a Tóibín fan it was like coming home to a cosy room as I settled in to page one and his simple very clear narrator’s voice with its always formal tone elicited by mainly short sentences with no contractions. It’s been twenty years or so of novelistic time since the happy ending of his novel Brooklyn (2009) when Eilis Lacey, from Enniscorthy (Tóibín’s home town in County Wexford, NE Ireland) returned to Brooklyn to continue her role as the recent wife of Italian, Tony Fiorello and to raise a family on Long Island.

Tóibín wastes no time and opens the narrative with the plot point that propels the story: a stranger arrives at Eilis’s front door with a piece of harsh news and his even harsher promise to make things worse. She lives in an enclave of the Fiorello family including her parents-in-law and Tony’s married brothers and she has forged a place in that family that she thought was secure but it’s her reaction to the news, and the only action she feels she can take, that causes her to doubt everything she has done in the past. This is despite her in-laws offering to solve the problem for her. Her stubborn Irish decision is played against the Italian pragmatic approach which she finds untenable. She refuses their help.

This is a common novelistic format: begin with an explosive event and then fill in the backstory along with the repercussions of the bomb. The reader is hooked from page one.

Brooklyn is an immigrant tale and the choices an immigrant must make, personified in the story as two men, one Irish and one an immigrant, like herself, forging an American life. She returns to Ireland to find if she has made the right choice; a little foolhardy since she has already married the Italian-American, something she does not tell anyone including her mother. She returns to America, her choice forced upon her because of her previous decisions. So, there has always been a doubt lurking in the dark, in the back of her mind and this doubt is brought to the fore in this new novel of a much older Eilis Lacey, a married American, secure, and with two teenage children.

She returns again to Ireland on the pretext of her mother’s forthcoming 80th birthday. Her twenty year ago Irish lover is still unmarried, but plans are underway to fix that. Can the way forward get more bumpy? Yes. Her children arrive! How does Eilis navigate her return to the family and ‘her Irish home’? She makes mistakes but will she learn from them? Meanwhile Tony, her foolish but devastated husband waits longingly for her to return to ‘her American home’. Once an immigrant, always an immigrant?

This is literary family fiction at its best.

You can buy the book here, in various formats.

On YouTube there are several videos, short and long, of Tóibín talking about this new book. Start with this short one.

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Earth by John Boyne

Book two of The Elements Quartet.

Irish writer, John Boyne whose work has been
translated into 59 languages making him the most
translated Irish writer of all time.

Evan Keogh is a minor character in the first novella of Boyne’s Elements Quartet, Water (2023) where, like, Earth, it is told in the first person; this time by Evan and his life after he fled the little island off the Irish coast forever, but left with the smell of its earth still under his fingernails.

He has an innate talent for football but no interest in it. He wants to be a painter. His upbringing was hell. An isolated backward place with a brutal and hateful father, a silent and down-trodden mother, and a best friend who betrays him. No wonder he ran away. He has vowed never to return to that island, he knows he is attractive, he is at ease with his sexuality (but always falls for the wrong people), and very ambitious. However, life doesn’t pan out as expected.

It opens in the days before a notorious rape trial. The narrative is two pronged: before and after. Evan, now a famous and wealthy soccer player is accused of accessory to rape; his straight mate, Robbie, accused of the crime itself. As the poor boy sits and waits for the trail to begin we learn about his life in London and how he ended up is such a threatening situation. Then comes the trial itself when we hear the testimony of the rape victim, an intelligent girl called Lauren. But we don’t hear about the testimony of Evan and Robbie; there’s a novelistic reason for that.

What impresses me about Boyne’s writing is it is so clear: the situation, the characters, how they feel, and his narrative choices that keep important plot events dangling before your wished discovery, just out of reach, until you are aching for them.

The scenes of sex and violence are vivid but Boyne’s words lead the reader to imagine them; he doesn’t actually describe them in detail. In other words, there’s more going on in the reader’s head than on the page. That’s good writing in my book, so don’t be fearful of what you might read.

Evan’s final decision is a very satisfying one, but will it finally rid him of that sour smell of his home island’s earth?

The next installment of The Elements Quartet is Fire, scheduled for release in November 2024.

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The Heart’s Invisible Furies by John Boyne

Irish writer, John Boyne whose work has been translated
into 59 languages making him the most translated Irish
writer of all time.

This is my second reading of this book. Back in 2017 I read it for the first time and fell in love with Boyne’s work. Here is my blog from that first reading: it’s still apt and relevant.

Many years ago, on a small plane trip – the plane was small, not the trip –  as we were about to land in a provincial Queensland town, I continued to assiduously read my book. I was laughing so much, trying not to, but not succeeding, that my eyes were streaming, my nose running, and my face felt hot and red; the flight attendant broke the rules, unbuckled, and hurried to my seat to ask if I needed medical assistance. I just held up the book; I was unable to speak. She understood. Maybe she’d read it too. It was the hit of the season. The hysterical section was the Nativity Scene from A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989) by John Irving. The next time I laughed out loud, many decades later (yes, decades), was with this book, and the (highly illegal) Dinner Party Scene, from early on in The Heart’s Invisible Furies (2017) by John Boyne. Ironically Boyne has dedicated this book to Irving.

Making people laugh via the written word, and only the written word, is an extremely difficult and hazardous task. You can’t under play it or over sell it, and you certainly can’t ‘back-explain’ it; it’s all to do with tone, and tone is like a law of physics: it only happens when the universal conditions are absolutely right. It’s as if you need to foster a certain psychological state of mind, and write the episode with as much truthfulness and sincerity as you possibly can – don’t elaborate – just tell it, and if the tone is right, it will be hysterical. If it isn’t you can’t go back and make it right, edit it funny, you have to delete it all and start again. A plane will only fly if all the necessary preparations and current circumstances, weather, wind, mechanical health, operational skill, and power source, are perfect.

The dinner party – and it’s impossible to explain why it’s illegal, you’ll just have to read it to find out – is on page 92, but the preparation for it, and the other laugh-out-loud bits, preparation for the tone, I mean, in true Irving-esque fashion, begins right from the first killer sentence; and by the way, the opening sentence of Owen Meany has to be the killer-opening-sentence in all literature. There was a time when I knew it by heart and it became my dinner-party piece for some time after. I can’t sing, tell a joke, or play the piano, you see.

Boyne considers Irving a mentor, and Irving should be chest-thumpingly proud.

It’s impossible for Boyne to escape the moniker of “author of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas” which he understands only too well, and he’s certain it will appear on his grave stone, so internationally popular was the book and film; but it changed his life making writing full time not only a possibility but a happy necessity.

Boyne was born in 1972. Ireland brought him up but the Church brought him down. He still suffers from its cruelty and hypocrisy. He’s not alone. His anger is present in this book but, much to his credit, he’s fashioned it into a cutting humour without lessening the truth of his understandable hatred.

The Heart’s Invisible Furies explains the life of Cyril Avery, although not a real Avery, from his pre-birth to two months before his death; from 1945 to 2015; and it is also the story of Ireland over that time; from a society dominated, straightjacketed, and suffocated by the Catholic Church, under the guise of strengthening morality, to one that legalises same-sex marriage. It’s a hell of a journey.

It’s full of surprising events, fashion, villains, extremely bad behaviour, political unrest, beauty, deception, selfishness, redemption, tears – yours as well as the character’s, death, forgiveness, love, birth in the midst of murder, politicians behaving badly, coincidences, literature, weddings, doctors behaving courageously, dreams – both fulfilled and dashed, sentiment, laughter, bigotry, violence, and even the ludicrous; in fact the entire palette that paints our lives that all conspires to prove that age-old adage, nobody’s perfect. And all these elements are wound around a cast of characters you won’t easily forget, and nor would you want to.

Boyne skilfully uses many literary devices to tantalise and seduce his readers: he drops in an outcome before explaining how it happened; he triggers the reader’s memory before the character’s; and, best of the lot, dramatic irony: when the reader knows more that the characters do.

I love this book and I’ve recommended it to others, who too have loved it. I’m preparing a space on my bookshelf, between Jane Bowles and Peter Carey. You can get the book, in various formats, here.

   

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Prophet Song by Paul Lynch

Irish writer, Paul Lynch, winner of the 2023 Booker Prize.

In July 2023 I was house sitting for a family member and the first thing I noticed was there were no books in the house. Then one afternoon while searching for an iron I found, on the bottom shelf of the linen closet, a pile of five books, four Agatha Christie novels, and one novel by an unknown writer. What caught my attention was one of the endorsements on the front cover of this unknown title was by my all-time favourite novelist, the Irishman Colm Tóibín. Being a fan of, and I thought knowledgeable about, Irish literature I was embarrassed not to know the novel, Red Sky at Morning (2013) nor the author, Paul Lynch. I read several pages, at first wary of the poetic language but awed by the ease of understanding, the tension of, and immediate involvement in, the story. I planned to steal it, but didn’t, wished now I had, and will next time I’m in that house.

The plot is simple: a dystopian society on the edge of collapse and a deeply moving story of a mother’s fight to hold her family together. That’s on the back cover so I’m not spoiling it for you.

The language is sometimes poetic:

How the dark gathers without sound the cherry trees. It gathers the last of the leaves and the leaves do not resist the dark but accept the dark in whisper. Tired now, the day almost behind her, all that still that

And the size and design of the font is surprising clear and easy on the eye: it is very neat and black. Recently some publishers have been printing in grey, to save money I assume, which I find annoying.

But what most readers will be talking about is the punctuation, or lack of it. In this book, Lynch does not punctuate dialogue. This renders each page a justified, on left and right, slab of text. It can, on first glance, look daunting.

She lifts two mugs and peers inside them, squeaks her finger around the rim. Dad, look at these mugs, why don’t you use the dishwasher, you really need to wear your glasses when washing up. Simon does not lift his eyes from the newspaper. I’m wearing my glasses right now, he says. But you need to wear them while washing up, these mugs are ringed with tea. You can blame the useless cleaning lady …

If you realise that you do not understand what you have just read, read the line again, read the paragraph again. Listen to your own reading voice. I had to do this initially. Just like turning to Dickens or Woolf, you need to get used to the different tone, the different syntax, and in this case, the different sentence structure. There’s a reason for this difference: Lynch’s fictional world is different; it’s falling apart. But, go with it. When you listen to an audio book the reader doesn’t ‘read’ the punctuation yet the listener understands perfectly who says what. Read like a listener and you will be rewarded.

Lynch burst onto the literary scene in triumph (more personal embarrassment – why didn’t I know?) when his first novel, that one I found next to the iron among the pile of Agatha Christies, was the prize of a six-publisher auction in London, and it won him acclaim abroad, especially in France where it was a finalist for France’s Best Foreign Book Award: Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger. He’s written three novels since. Prophet Song is his fifth.

It’s a unique book and a remarkable feat of imagination worth getting stuck into.

Here is a succinct Q&A video by Paul Lynch, on the Booker short list, before the announcement of the prize winner.

You can buy the book here, in various formats.

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Academy Street by Mary Costello

Christmas Read 2

Irish writer Mary Costello

This writer, ‘one of literature’s finest new voices’ it says on the back cover, was new to me. I took it on my recent Christmas break. Previously a short story writer, this is her first novel.

This is a story of the life of Tess Lohan, from her mother’s funeral in Ireland through years of growing up, motherhood, work, and tragedy through to her old age in New York. It sounds like an epic but the book is slim, only 179 pages, but it is packed full of, not just events, but emotion. Costello’s experience of the short story has given her an economy of language.

It contains the usual tropes one expects from Irish fiction: hard religious fathers, stoic women, and the children who have to put up with surviving within their orbits. Tess moves to New York to start a new life – just like Colm Tóbín’s protagonist in Brooklyn (2009) – and eventually lives in an apartment on Academy Street. It is written in the usual third person but oscillates between the present and past tense to suit the writer’s intent.

The opening scene, her mother’s funeral, is imbued with little child expectations and ignorances. Her sisters corral her to join the family but she sees things from between people’s legs, from behind furniture, through windows and finds it easy to imagine that what is happening isn’t happening at all. Any moment her mother will come down the stairs in her new blue dress and Tess will sigh and realise she had it all wrong. It is someone else’s funeral; someone else is in the big shiny box with the gold handles. And Tess’s life will continue like before. We all know how easy it is to know something but not know something at the same time. She runs upstairs to find her mother but when she can’t she rummages through her mother’s wardrobe. And the new blue dress is not there either. There is a black cloth over her mother’s dressing mirror. So, yes, she knows where the new blue dress really is.

I won’t explain the events of the story because they are the story. It’s a life that could happen to anyone. Fate, mistakes, ignorance, love, and neglect are all familiar to all. It’s so hard to control a life, especially when it’s happening.

Costello’s writing is reminiscent of that other Irish short story writer, experiencing great acclaim at the moment, Claire Keegan, whose short stories, especially her latest ones, have been published as novels. Academy Street (2014) is definitely a novel but the tone and that of Keegan’s is similar. Apt descriptions and the understanding of the very things, sometimes small things, that are pertinent and important to a life. These writers know what a reader needs.

Yes, this is literary fiction but with a heart. Highly recommended.

Here you can buy the book in various formats.

And here is an interview with Mary Costello, winner of The Eason Novel of the Year 2014.

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The Queen of Dirt Island by Donal Ryan

Irish writer Donal Ryan

Donal Ryan’s 6th novel, The Queen of Dirt Island (2022) is a novel of very short chapters. All of them are short-titled and just shy of 2 pages. I would describe myself as a tough reader: it takes a lot to stir my emotions. Yet, chapter one at just one and three-quarter pages, moved me greatly. I read it four times. Of course, the emotion faded with familiarity but Ryan’s skill and control was always evident.

It’s like flicking through a family album picking up tit-bits that put the snaps into a semblance of order and understanding that becomes a narrative.

It’s the story of Saoirse (SER sha) Alyward raised by her mother, Eileen, and Nana, Mary, Eileen’s mother-in-law. Everyone speaks, adults and children, in a basic Irish rural lexicon with a heavy sprinkling of foul language at ease with the many Catholic idioms and easy blasphemy, illuminating the rural mind, more fearful of the weather than of god. They call themselves a family

…all sort of humming along in that comfortable dysfunction that seems to be the best any family can hope for…

but one that is treated with suspicion and contempt: there’s no man in the house. Saoirse had never felt afraid until at the age of fourteen years and nine months when an officious social worker asked her gossip-based leading questions about her mother’s integrity.

Her situation is slowly revealed: poverty, her mother’s privileged but outraged and aloof family, as well as her hardening personality to match the life that treacherous circumstances have chosen for her. It’s a story of husband-less and father-less women surviving in a land of patriarchal power but manage to create their own womanised niche while, at the same time, having to deal with feckless men blind to their own weaknesses.

Ryan describes writing as “burgeoning visions”. One of my gripes is that a few plot points, few ‘visions’, feel as if they’ve emanated from the writer’s universe and squeezed to fit into the story’s universe. For example, the sudden desire of Josh, Saoirse’s ill-matched boyfriend, to be a novelist and write Saoirse’s story,

…to make a record, he said … all of these things that happened, all of these dramas, all of these shades of declension between love and its absence, between living and dying, between love and hate…to sublimate all of this life into art…

the product of which she rejects and writes her own. It is, of course, a success. It’s a petty complaint and thankfully doesn’t distract from the excellence of the writing and the engaging characters and their story. But it could be seen as a metaphor for the resilience of women which makes it less of a complaint and more of a novelistic device.

Donal Ryan is one of many Irish writers that are part of what Sebastian Barry, the current Irish Laureate for Fiction, calls the ‘golden age’ of Irish writing. Writers like, Anne Enright, Colm Tóibín, Paul Murray, Elaine Feeney, Claire Keegan, Barry himself, all much loved and awarded, and Paul Lynch who on November 26th was announced as the winner of the 2023 Booker Prize for his 5th novel Prophet Song.

If you like Irish writing please, if you haven’t already, add Donal Ryan to your list.

Here you can read my blog about Ryan’s 4th novel from a low and quiet sea (2018)

You can hear Donal Ryan talking about The Queen of Dirt Island here.

You can buy the book is various formats here.

 

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The Wren, The Wren by Anne Enright

Irish writer, Anne Enright, won the 2007 Booker Prize and the 2008 Irish Book of the Year for her third novel The Gathering.

Conversation is very different to writing. Conversation, saying what you mean, incorporates a lot of facial expressions, body language, shared history, and – most importantly – tone. Writing has none of that unless the writer uses more words to incorporate all that conversational stuff. Hence writing takes more words to get across everything conversation can do with less.

The first chapter of Anne Enright’s The Wren, The Wren (2023) is written conversationally without all that wordy conversational stuff. She creates this conversational tone not with words but with a lack of words and with a creative attitude to punctuation and line length. For the reader, this takes a little getting used to; don’t give up if you think you might. You just need to exercise more readerly skills and your wish to know will show you what you need to do. It doesn’t take long. 

Does he love me
Is that him
Waiting for this man is better than being with him, it was certainly more intense, the way longing kept eating itself and giving birth to more longing. And nothing, but nothing was better than that first flash of arrival.
He loves me
There he is

This format has a subtle purpose: it prepares you for what this story is about: a poem. Or, more specifically, the shadow of its poet.

The first person narrator of the first chapter, NELL, is a young woman in thrall to the love of a man. See above. She’s young. Carmel is her mother and is the focus of the second chapter, CARMEL. She is older, of course, and so is the chapter’s format, more conventional, like Carmel who is the daughter of the poet Philip McDaragh, the writer of the poem, The Wren, The Wren.

Enright has a knack with language and uses her prose to characterise her creations. In her novel, The Green Road, one of her characters is a gay man living in Greenwich Village in New York. Her prose when dealing with him tells you far more about the character than what he says or does. Similarly here, Nell’s chapters, in their language and layout, reflect the character of Nell, modern, texting, informal, and peripatetic. Carmel’s chapters are more conventional, familiar, grounded, and mature.

Anne Enright is a writer of family. Her Booker Prize winning novel The Gathering (2007) is about a gathering of a family after a death in it. Her better book, The Green Road (2015) is about the gathering of a family after their prickly mother has decided to sell the farm. The Forgotten Waltz (2011) is a slight departure in that it’s about lust told through the eyes of ‘the other woman’, while Actress (2020) is about a mother-daughter relationship that also includes, fractiously, the mother’s career vs the mother role.

This is a novel without a narrative arc. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a story; there are many stories, particularly Nell’s and Carmel’s. Philip McDaragh left is wife and two young daughters, the youngest Carmel, and became a famous poet. The women, including Carmel’s daughter Nell – who never met her grandfather – would see him on television in a bar or YouTube clips on their phones and see a man strangely known to them but who now they must share with thousands of others and think how unfair that is. The shadow of Philip McGaragh follows these women all their lives and certainly colours Nell’s relationships with men.

Men (most) leave their families, even if they stay at home. Or am I, the reader, bringing my own meaning to this work? Readers can and should bring something to other people’s fiction. If my own father had lived long and past my 5th birthday I would be a very different person to the man I am now.

I loved this book not just because it is so different but because, even if the action is soft, the sentences, most of them, spark your interest simply because of the words she uses. I’ve searched and found many examples but showing them to you out of context doesn’t do them justice.

You’ll have to read it yourself to know what I mean.

It’s entertaining on many levels, a true work of art, a literary novel that you can easily enjoy again and again because there isn’t a plot to forget.

You can buy the book in various formats here.

Here you can watch the Waterstones Interview with Anne Enright about this new novel.

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Shadows on our Skin by Jennifer Johnston

Jennifer Johnston’s Shadows on our Skin (1977) was shortlisted for the Booker. The winner that year? Iris Murdoch’s The Sea The Sea.

Irish novelist and playwright, Jennifer Johnston

There is so much going on on Johnston’s Page 1: The protagonist, young Joe NOT paying attention in maths class; writing a daring poem about hating his father and wishing him dead; Miss McCabe, the frustrated teacher, squeaking her chalk to demonstrate the glories of the equilateral triangle – each image illuminating an unwritten, but acknowledged, back-story. Joseph Logan has such a miserable home life (a ruined, bitter, and abusive father and a disappointed, sour, but high-principled mother) but dispite his dour life, almost McGahern*-ish, the writing is so vivid. Everything is so clear. Johnston puts sound (squeak squeak of the chalk), thoughts of the characters (Because I hate you so), little telling actions (Hot fat spotted the floor) into the narrative, as well as comments from the narrator (The conversation wasn’t exactly swinging). You have to be vigilant and take notice of the tiny singular quotation marks: it’s important that you know what is said and what is thought, and who thinks it. It’s a rich and full tapestry of little black marks, full of meaning, that make up a page of narrative. But the most telling and useful writer’s tool she uses is dialogue. I know of one Australian teacher of creative writing who advises her students (or used to) to steer clear of dialogue. What a misguided and anti-creative piece of advice! Dialogue is one of the most effective, useful, and versatile tools a writer can have. A line of speech can paint a character more effectively than a paragraph of description. Needless to say, I enjoyed it immensely; more than half of this text has people talking, with very few adverbs. It’s clear, by the words they use, how they are spoken.

The story is set during The Troubles, in the early 1970s, in Londonderry, Northern Ireland. There’s always gunfire in the distance. Joe sees a young woman sitting on a wall. He’s noticed her before but one day he sits down next to her. Her name is Kathleen, she’s a teacher, a chain-smoker, and family-less. All three attributes alien to the boy. This meeting and their growing relationship provides the catalyst for the narrative. His older brother Brendan comes back from England but what he does when out at night remains a mystery. The father lives on his past triumphs as a fighter against the British, but now that his health is rapidfly declining it’s only his memories, or fantasies, that sustain him. The mother is stoic and sour, bitter about her lot as bread-winner and carer of a useless man but diligent in her responsibilities. Love seems as alien as good weather. And the British soldiers and gunshots get ever closer.

And then one day Brendan meets Kathleen… no spoilers here.

I was convinced that the narrative would end tragically, and yes it doesn’t end well but quite differently to what I expected.

My book-fairy (an Irishman retired to Brussels who comes to my island home bearing books twice a year) introduced me to Johnston via her 1974 novel How Many Miles to Babylon?, a WWI tale of class, affection, and betrayal. I now want to read more. Her last published book was Naming the Stars (2015). She lives near Dublin.

Some years ago, I received an email from an English writer; she obviously found my contact details on this blog. She wasn’t having much success with getting her work published so she founded her own publishing house. She was impressive and obviously determined and entrepreneurial. She asked me to review her novel and post it on my blog. I was happy to oblige. My expectations were misguided. The writing was long-winded and verbose. It appeared the writer’s main aim was to impress the reader with her vocabulary and lengthy sentences. I read the prologue twice; there was tension in the text, but still I had no idea where the two characters were nor what they were talking about. I replied to her carefully but pointed out that simple and clear sentences were the best way to tell a story. I ultimately blamed myself telling her that ‘I was not the reader for her.’ I should recommend this book to her.

The BBC filmed it in 1980, directed by Jim O’Brien with a screenplay by Derek Mahon.

Here is a short, but surprising, clip of Jennifer Johnston talking about writing.

You can purchase the book in various formats here.

*John McGahern (1934 – 2006) the Irish writer famous for his bleak settings: the squat Irish homes of the rural poor, usually dominated by a deeply religious, unforgiving, and brutal husband and father.

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Amongst Women by John McGahern

Irish writer John McGahern (1934 – 2006)

And so continues my love-affair with Irish fiction.

“John McGahern is the Irish novelist everyone should read”, says Colm Tóibín and, considered by some as, arguably the most important Irish novelist since Samuel Beckett. I’m a little bashful to then admit this is the first McGahern work I have read; it won’t be my last.

McGahern’s work has universally been praised. I often think to myself when I hear or read comments about ‘good writing’; so that is good writing, yes, I can see that, but what makes it good?

Recently, I was contacted by a British writer who wanted me to review her recently finished novel. I assume she had come across this very blog where she obtained my contact details. If I agreed to her request she would send me her eBook free of charge. I did; she did. She had created a publishing house in order to publish and promote her work which I thought was very entrepreneurial of her. I began reading with rosy expectation. It began with a Prologue which I read. I read it again. I then wrote to her to apologise but I was not the reader she was searching for and that I would not be reading the rest. I was polite and blamed myself for my lack of understanding and appreciation.

I had just began reading Amongst Women (1991) and hurried back to it.

What makes writing good is an economy of language: clear and apt sentences of time and place; plain words, character-building skills via close writing1 with evocative dialogue; and the necessary understanding of the importance of the narrative voice. Oh, and a deep understanding and interest in human nature. Of course, grammar and syntax are also important but secondarily so.

John McGahern’s Amongst Women is an example of good writing.

Out of the many false starts her life had made she felt they were witnessing this pure beginning that she would seize and make true. No longer, exposed and vulnerable, would she have to chase and harry after happiness.

You could not successfully trim even one word, nor would you need to add another.

Michael Moran, based largely on McGahern’s own father, is an aging Irish farmer from the north west. He has five children: three daughters, Mona, Shiela, and Maggie – and two sons, the estranged eldest, Luke, and the youngest, Michael, still at school. This is a story about a strict father confident in his position as the head of the house and a God-fearing Catholic. The latter underpins and authorises the former. He is a tyrant, grumpy one minute, then playful, then grumpy again. His women both love and fear him. Words of love and understanding are rare. As a widower he marries a woman, Rose, visiting from Scotland. She succumbed to his handsomeness and learns to tolerate his moods. She, in fact, becomes like another daughter. Moran among his four women.

Irish Catholic rural life, and its decline, at a time of great change, women’s emancipation, the authority of the Church, and the practical considerations church-goers have to make to get on with their lives; these are the themes expertly depicted. There is no narrative curve, no climax, just the rhythms of family life; a McGahern specialty. It is his most famous and best loved work.

Amongst Women was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won The Irish Times/Aer Lingus Literary Award (1991). It was adapted for television in 1998 and won Best Television Drama at the Irish Film and Television Awards.

All the episodes of the television series can be found on YouTube. Simply search for Amongst Women.

Here is an interview with John McGahern presented by The Howard Poetry and Literary Society of Columbia Maryland, USA in 1993.

You can buy the book in various formats here.

  1. Close writing (or free indirect discourse) describes a special type of third-person narration that slips in and out of characters’ consciousness. In other words, characters’ thoughts, feelings, and words are filtered through the third-person narrator into the narrative style. The opening few lines of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) by James Joyce is a grand and famous example of close writing.
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A History of Loneliness by John Boyne

Irish writer, John Boyne.

When you are born into a Judeo-Christian society you are a product of that society whether you subscribe to the belief system or not, and that goes for all societies that have a belief system at their core.

Belief systems have accompanied human existence since the year dot; they predate governments and were in fact human’s first taste of governance. It belies our history to denounce religious belief as irrelevant and purely a product of our human ability to imagine a truth even if that truth doesn’t exist. It would be equally absurd to denounce our artistic nature simply because it is another product of our imagination that also allows us to make up stories.

However, there is a difference, a big difference, between a belief system and the administration of that belief system. It is the synagogue, the temple, the mosque, the church that tells their followers what to wear, what they can eat and when to eat it, how to sing, what the god meant, and what they must do to get to a better place; to be blunt, it is the belief system that sustains its followers but the administration that damages them. And to be blunt again, this book is about how a good priest comes to terms with a bad one.

I’m avoiding using the word evil, which shouldn’t really exist as a noun, it is better used only as an adjective: people do evil things, and at the heart of every evil thing is a need. In some cases that need, and the person’s actions to satisfy that need, are distorted, sometimes outrageously so, but nevertheless a need that needs to be sated. In some cases that need isn’t understood even by the perpetrator of the resulting evil deeds which makes them all the more difficult, some say impossible, to judge, correct, or punish.

A History of Loneliness (2014) is the book before Boyne’s master-work, The Heart’s Invisible Furies (2017) – the book that introduced me to this author – and these two books are the only ones set in his native Ireland.

Obran Yates is an Irish boy with a malleable nature. He enters a seminary in 1972 at the behest of his mother because she tells him he has a calling, and we follow his education with its friendships and frustrations, his family with its joys and tragedies, and his work as a teacher and parish priest with its disappointments and sacrifices. In parallel with this history of priestly life is the shadow of sexual abuse at the hands of priests; a shadow that grows and darkens despite that administration’s attempts to ignore it.

We all know about this blight on our Judeo-Christian society. Names like George Pell and Malka Leifer remind us of it almost nightly between Covid-19 news updates.

The writing is assured, confident, and skillful and Boyne pulls no punches. He has confessed to having a hot anger against the Catholic Church for decades but he has channelled that anger to tell a story about a good priest who like most religious leaders do the right thing and sustain the believers in their care, but Boyne also makes it clear that the old response – don’t let a few bad apples taint the whole barrel – is a very poor one. Why? because the administration of christianity is rigidly hierarchical and fiercely insular in its protection of itself, to the point of betraying then abandoning those in its care. Speaking out against their own is not what priests do. They should and hopefully will.

The belief system says “Suffer little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God” and the administration of that belief system has completely reversed and blighted the meaning.

This is a book that needs to be read. It is also a great argument for the power of fiction to tell us the truth.

Here is an interview with John Boyne about A History of Loneliness.

You can purchase the book in various formats here.

by Categories: Book review, Irish literature, Literary criticismTags: , , , , 2 Comments