Tag Archives: Ireland

The Barracks by John McGahern

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First published in 1963, The Barracks was John McGahern’s debut novel, written when he was in his late twenties. Now considered one of Ireland’s greatest authors, McGahern wrote about a world he knew very well, with The Barracks drawing on various experiences from his own childhood – particularly the early death of his mother, Susan, from cancer in 1944 and the years he spent living in the Cootehall Garda Barracks where his father, Frank, a Police sergeant, lived and worked. It’s a sad, beautifully observed novel that delves deep into character, which on paper ought to have been literary catnip for me; but in this instance, something stopped me from loving it as much as McGahern’s masterpiece, Amongst Women. Then again, maybe my expectations were unfairly high.

The Barracks revolves around Elizabeth, a housewife in her early forties who lives with her husband, Reegan, a sergeant in the Garda, and his three young children from a previous marriage. Once a nurse with a busy, independent life in London during the turmoil and uncertainty of the Blitz, Elizabeth has now settled for a quieter existence, one dictated by various domestic routines at the Garda barracks in rural Ireland where Reegan is based. Her family hadn’t wanted her to marry Reegan, a man they considered somewhat diffident and prone to flashes of temper, but Elizabeth was ready for a life of her own choosing, away from London and the painful memories it evoked.

She married Reegan. She was determined to grasp at a life of her own desiring, no longer content to drag through with her repetitive days, neither happy nor unhappy, merely passing them in the wearying spirit of service; and the more the calls of duty tried to tie her down to this life the more intolerably burdensome it became. (pp. 15–16)

The marriage is one of companionship, security and mutual dependency rather than love or desire. Nevertheless, Elizabeth seems resigned to this arrangement, finding solace in her contributions to the smooth running of the household and her familiar domestic routines.

…had she married Reegan because she had been simply sick of living at the time and forced to create some illusion of happiness about him so that she might be able to go on? She’d no child of her own now. She’d achieved no intimacy with Reegan. He was growing more and more restless. He, too, was sick, sick of authority and the police, sick of obeying orders, threatening to break up this life of theirs in the barracks, but did it matter so much now? Did it matter where they went, whether one thing happened more than another? It seemed to matter less and less. An hour ago she’d been on the brink of collapse and if she finally collapsed did anything matter? (pp. 49–50)

Early in the novel, it becomes clear that Elizabeth is likely living with undiagnosed breast cancer. She has found lumps in her breast but has done nothing to seek assistance from the doctor despite her earlier training as a nurse. Instead, she tries to focus on the myriad of small daily tasks that must be carried out to keep the household ticking along. Any spare time would only be filled by worries about her condition, and the thought of spiralling downwards is too frightening to bear.

This’d be the only time of the day she might get some grip and vision on the desperate activity of her life. She was Elizabeth Reegan: a woman in her forties: sitting in a chair with a book from the council library in her hand that she hadn’t opened: watching certain things like the sewing-machine and the vase of daffodils and a circle still white with frost under the shade of the sycamore tree between the house and the river: alive in this barrack kitchen, with Casey down in the dayroom: with a little time to herself before she’d have to get another meal ready: with a life on her hands that was losing the last vestiges of its purpose and meaning: with hard cysts within her breast she feared were cancer… (p. 49)

With her strength failing with every passing day, Elizabeth knows the time has come to face up to her condition by seeing the unit’s doctor – a task she has been delaying for fear of the probable diagnosis. (We are in 1950s Ireland here, a time when cancer was rarely discussed publicly – and possibly not even privately, depending on the patient’s character. There’s also a suggestion here that Elizabeth might not even be told that she has cancer, that maybe this fact will be withheld from her or shared only with Reegan, such was the conservative nature of Irish society back then.)

She knew she must see a doctor, but she’d known that months before, and she had done nothing. (…)

What the doctor would do was simple. He’d send her for a biopsy. She might be told the truth or she might not when they got the result back, depending on them and on herself. If she had cancer she’d be sent for treatment. She had been a nurse. She had no illusions about what would happen. (p. 34)

Essentially, the novel follows the Reegan family as they pussyfoot around this crisis. Elizabeth knows she is dying, a realisation that inevitably prompts reflection and the raking over of past regrets, of lives that might have been lived but were never realised.

What was her life? Was she ready to cry halt and leave? Had it achieved anything or been given any meaning? She was no more ready to die now than she had been twenty years ago. (p. 85)

Central to the novel is the question of whether Elizabeth has lived a meaningful and fulfilling life. In some respects, she has been dying inside long before the breast cancer started to destroy her physical strength and resilience. Her life at the barracks is mundane and narrow, a world away from the excitement she once experienced in London with her former lover, Michael Halliday, the dashing doctor she met through her work at the hospital. Despite being somewhat fickle, Michael broadened Elizabeth’s cultural horizons by giving her books and taking her to plays at the theatre. How might her life have turned out had their relationship been more stable? Would it have been more pleasurable, more fulfilling than the one she has experienced with Reegan? Sadly though, for various reasons that McGahern duly reveals, this affair with Michael was torrid and painfully short-lived.

He [Halliday] had changed everything in her life and solved nothing: the first rush of the excitement of discovery, and then the failure of love, contempt changing to self-contempt and final destruction, its futile ashes left in her own hands. (p. 209)

Meanwhile, Reegan is embroiled in his own longstanding battle at work, which McGahern depicts with a strong sense of authenticity. A former leader in the Irish War of Independence, Reegan is frustrated by the futile regulations he must conform to as a Garda sergeant, and an ongoing feud with Superintendent Quirke leaves him feeling bitter and resentful. In truth, Reegan would like nothing more than to tell Quirke where he can stick his routine patrols and duty logs as he dreams of saving enough money to buy a local farm. A side hustle of selling turf from the nearby bog consumes much of his spare time, but one wonders whether it’s a convenient excuse to break free from the constraints of the barracks.

Where this quietly devastating novel really excels though is in its portrayal of Elizabeth’s inner world as she struggles with her illness. While the book is written in the third person, McGahern holds us close to Elizabeth’s viewpoint – a noteworthy achievement for a male writer in his late twenties, especially with a debut novel of this nature. This is a world in which emotions are kept under wraps, where no one seems able to openly acknowledge that Elizabeth is terminally ill. McGahern also pays great attention to the daily rhythms and rituals of life in this close community: the importance of church and family, the devotion to prayer; the small gestures of friends and neighbours when Elizabeth’s illness becomes known; everything here is so well observed.

They came before Elizabeth had her packing finished, all the policemen’s wives, Mrs. Casey and Mrs Brennan and Mrs Mullins. They were excited, the intolerable vacuum of their own lives filled with speculation about the drama they already saw circling about this new wound. (p. 106)

Alongside the characterisation, there is some lovely descriptive writing here, capturing the small moments of beauty in Elizabeth’s world.

The whiteness was burning rapidly off the fields outside, brilliant and glittering on the short grass as it vanished; and the daffodils that yesterday she had arranged in the white vase on the sill were a wonder of yellowness in the sunshine, the heads massed together above the cold green stems disappearing into the mouth of the vase. (pp. 48–49)

Even though I didn’t find The Barracks quite as engaging or enjoyable as Amongst Women, it’s still a very accomplished novel. McGahern’s insights into coming to terms with death are especially perceptive, as are his portrayals of small-town life in rural Ireland at this time, replete with the burden these characters seem destined to bear. Recommended, especially for fans of William Trevor, Claire Keegan and Colm Tóibín. (I read this book for Cathy’s Reading Ireland event, which runs throughout March.)

My Books of the Year, 2025 – Part 2

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As in previous years, I’ve spread my Books of the Year across two posts. Part 1, published on Tuesday, highlighted my favourites from the first half of the reading year (roughly speaking), while Part 2 features the standout reads from the second half of 2025. Apologies, but I couldn’t bear to leave any of them out, even though it means a total of twenty-six books for the year as a whole.

So, to cut to the chase, here are my favourite reads from mid-2025 onwards, most of which were first published in the 20th century. Alongside the titles featured in Part 1, these are the books I loved, the books that have stayed with me, the books I’m most likely to recommend to other readers. I’ve summarised each book in this post, but in each instance, you can find my full review by clicking on the relevant title.

(Not pictured: A Land in Winter, read on audio)

Brother of the More Famous Jack by Barbara Trapido (1982)

Brother… is a coming-of-age novel, and a superb one at that, partly due to Trapido’s prose, which is sharp, lively and flecked with dry wit. Our narrator is Katherine Browne, a bright, impressionable young woman, ready to break away from her prim, suburban upbringing in North London at the age of eighteen. Happily, I found her voice utterly engaging from the start. The novel follows Katherine as she moves to London, where she is taken under the wings of her ebullient philosophy professor and his bohemian family. Love, heartache and a spell in Italy duly follow, with more heartbreak hovering on the horizon.

In summary, it’s a captivating and insightful novel about first love, heartache, disillusionment and growing up – as moving and unsentimental as it is funny and charming. Trapido also touches on motherhood, grief and depression in the narrative, weaving together wry humour and genuine poignancy to excellent effect.

Amongst Women by John McGahern (1990)

Ostensibly the story of Moran, an ageing, tyrannical father, whose wife and daughters both love and fear him, this novel can also be seen as a reflection of the deeply conservative nature of Irish society during much of the 20th century, a world dominated by stifling patriarchal power structures in which women were kept firmly in their place. Beautifully constructed in simple, unadorned prose, McGahern has written a superb character study here – a minor masterpiece with an immersive sense of place. I adored this subtle novel, which feels so well suited to fans of William Trevor, Colm Tóibín, Claire Keegan and Dierdre Madden, all of whom have an innate ability to see into the hearts and minds of their characters with insight and precision, laying bare their deepest preoccupations and insecurities for the reader to see.

Palladian by Elizabeth Taylor (1947)

First published in 1946, Palladian is something of an outlier in Elizabeth Taylor’s oeuvre. On one level, it is the story of a recently orphaned eighteen-year-old girl, Cassandra Dashwood, whose headmistress finds her a position as a governess following the death of her father. Young, naive and something of a romantic, Cassandra quickly determines to fall in love with her new employer, Marion Vanbrugh, a rather closeted, effeminate widower who, in the wake of WW2, seems disconnected from the harsh realities of British life. So far, so Jane Eyre, albeit a 20th-century version.

However, beyond this initial set-up, darker preoccupations emerge. Decay, disintegration and self-destruction seem to be Taylor’s major themes here, from the crumbling façade, interiors and statues that characterise Copthorne Manor, the Vanbrugh’s jaded estate, to the self-loathing, bitterness and angst exhibited by various family members and their acquaintances. As ever with Taylor, the characterisation is sharp and insightful – from the main protagonists to the supporting players, everyone is brilliantly sketched. Interestingly, this book has really grown in my mind since I re-read it earlier this year. A surprisingly enduring novel, which demonstrates that even a ‘lesser’ Taylor is streets ahead of many other writers’ best.

A Woman by Sibilla Aleramo, 1906 (tr. Erica Segre and Simon Carnell)

What a phenomenal book this is, an autobiographical feminist novel first published in Italian in 1906, under a pseudonym due to its radical content! Touching on similar themes to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s seminal text The Yellow Wallpaper and Alba de Cespedes’ startling confessional novel Forbidden Notebook, in which a woman explores the right to her own existence in light of the demands of marriage and motherhood, Aleramo’s A Woman reads like a howl from the past, a cry of anguish for liberty, independence and intellectual fulfilment in an oppressive world.

In passionate, emotive prose, Aleramo lays bare the horrific realities of life for a young Italian woman trapped in a brutal, patriarchal society, in which a married woman is considered her husband’s property to do with as he pleases. I found it a vital, propulsive read, an early example of feminist autofiction that deserves to be widely read. Annie Ernaux fans should be rushing to pick this up!

Love in a Fallen City by Eileen Chang, 1943-7 (tr. Karen S. Kingsbury, 2007 & Eileen Chang, 1996)

In this insightful, exquisitely written collection of four novellas and two short stories, Chang exposes the traditional social mores at play in 1940s Shanghai and Hong Kong, complete with all the cruelties, restrictions and hypocrisies these unwritten rules dictate. Born into an aristocratic family in Shanghai in 1920, Chang was raised by her deeply traditional father, an opium addict, and her more progressive mother, a woman of ‘sophisticated…and cosmopolitan tastes’, partly developed during time spent as a student in the UK. Her family background and formative experiences enabled Chang to straddle different cultures and see the world from different angles.

In her precision, attention to detail and scalpel-like dissection of the complexities of human behaviour and social mores, Chang reminds me of Edith Wharton, another female writer whose characters often find themselves trapped between two worlds: one driven by personal needs and desires, another by societal conventions and moral codes. There are other similarities too, not least an interest in their characters’ inner lives, often closed to outside observers, but vividly alive inside. Both writers are also adept at combining psychological acuity with a strong sense of cultural place, all cloaked in precise, elegant prose. Highly recommended for fans of this style.

A Note in Music by Rosamond Lehmann (1930)

An exquisitely observed exploration of two loveless, unfulfilling marriages and the shifts in dynamics that occur when two captivating visitors enter their stagnant world. Set in an unnamed provincial town during the interwar years, A Note… features two couples, Grace and Tom Fairfax and their friends, Norah and Gerald MacKay, all of whom are discontented in their different ways. Into this troubled world comes Hugh Miller, a bright, sensitive, passionate young man who charms everyone he meets, and his sophisticated, liberated sister, Clare.

Something that Lehmann does particularly well here is to illustrate how inner lives can be altered in subtle but highly significant ways, even when outwardly everything remains broadly the same. By the end of the year, Hugh and Clare will have departed, leaving the Fairfaxes and MacKays to carry on with their lives largely as before. Nevertheless, internally, the tectonic plates have shifted, opening up new levels of understanding and appreciation between Grace & Tom – and between Norah & Gerald. Early middle age is a tricky period for many of us, a time when the optimism, rapture and ambitions of youth may have given way to routine, resignation and a lack of fulfilment. Lehmann writes beautifully about these challenges, showing us how new understandings can be reached in the present, even if the past can never be recaptured.

A Private View by Anita Brookner (1994)

This superb novel is somewhat different from Brookner’s trademark stories of unmarried women living quiet, unfulfilled lives while waiting for their unattainable lovers to make fleeting appearances before disappearing into the night. In this instance, Brookner turns her gaze towards the aptly named George Bland, a quiet, respectable, recently retired man in his mid-sixties living a dull, highly ordered existence in a comfortable London flat. In many respects, he is the male equivalent of Brookner’s archetypal spinsters – a man adrift, living a narrow life on the periphery, while all the excitement and passion seems to be taking place elsewhere.

As the novel unfolds, Brookner explores what can happen when such a life is disrupted, raising the tantalising possibility that it might veer off course. With Brookner’s A Private View, the catalyst for the potential derailment is the arrival of an alluring, infuriating young woman, who takes up residence in the flat opposite George’s. Every time I read another Brooker, I find a new favourite, and this was no exception to the trend!

The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller (2024)

A moving, elegantly crafted novel that goes deep into character, Miller’s latest takes place in the winter of 1962-63, one of the coldest British winters on record, when temperatures plummeted, blizzards swept in and rivers began to freeze over. It’s an atmospheric backdrop for this story of two marriages, in which the author gives us access to the inner world of each of his main characters – their hopes and dreams, their preoccupations and fears.

As this slow-burning novel unfolds, Miller excels at reflecting the bleak, desolate landscapes of the brittle West Country winter in the emotional isolation felt by his four protagonists – a troubled, hard-to penetrate GP and his lonely, pregnant wife, plus an ambitious, educated farmer and his flighty partner, a former dancer in a Bristol nightclub. Each figure is preoccupied and adrift in their own individual way, raising the possibility that either of these marriages could easily fracture, should the hand of fate twist one way instead of the other. It’s a beautifully written book, very much in tune with the 20th-century writers I love.

The Juniper Tree by Barbara Comyns (1985)

Regular readers of this blog are probably aware of my fondness for Barbara Comyns – a startlingly original writer with a very distinctive style. Her novels have a strange, slightly off-kilter feel, frequently blending surreal imagery and touches of dark, deadpan humour with the harsh realities of life. This wry sense of the absurd is one of Comyns’ trademarks, cleverly tempering the darkness with a captivating lightness of touch. There’s often a sadness in her narratives too, a sense of poignancy or melancholy that runs through the text. First published in 1985, The Juniper Tree is very much in this vein.

In short, it’s a clever, dreamlike reimagining of the Grimms’ fairy tale of the same name – in fact, the novella’s epigraph is a rhyme taken directly from that classic story. Ostensibly set in London in the late 20th century, Comyns’ spin on The Juniper Tree reads like a timeless dark fable, weaving together the innocence and savagery that characterise many of this author’s best books. While much of what happens here is rooted in reality, Comyns invests her narrative with a surreal, otherworldly quality, tilting the familiar into something slightly off-kilter. Right from the very start, the reader is unsettled, sensing perhaps the tragedy to come…

Crooked Cross by Sally Carson (1934)

For a novel first published in 1934, Sally Carson’s Crooked Cross feels remarkably timely, charting, as it does, the rise of Nazism in the early 1930s, the falling apart of a country’s fundamental codes of decency and the moral fortitude required to stand against persecution. Recently republished by Persephone Books, the book makes chilling reading in 2025, a time when far-right extremism, hate speech and inhumane discrimination against various groups continue to increase.

Carson was a frequent visitor to Bavaria in the early 1930s, and her insights into what was happening there fed into Crooked Cross. In some respects, she was writing in real time, sounding a warning alarm on the pernicious rise of fascism and its grip on the nation. By scrutinising the broader political developments spreading across Germany through the lens of the Klugers, an ordinary middle-class family living in the fictional town of Kranach, close to the Austrian border, Carson illustrated the allure of the fascist movement, particularly for disaffected young men. Lacking the structure and focus of regular work, these men saw the Nazi Party as providing many of the things that had been lacking in their lives, from stability, status, power and responsibility to purpose, direction and a reason to exist. Moreover, the movement gave young Germans a convenient scapegoat – i.e. the Jews – to blame for everything that had been denied them in the lean post-WW1 years. A brilliant, terrifying, immersive novel that deserves to be widely read – it’s also an excellent combination of the personal and political, just the type of book I love.

Lady L. by Romain Gary (1958)

Published in English in 1958 and subsequently translated into French by the author himself, Lady L. was my first experience of Romain Gary’s fiction, but hopefully not my last. What a delightful novella this turned out to be – an elegant story of love, long-held secrets and railing against the conventional establishment, in which the pull of personal desires is pitted against political principles and beliefs! It reads like a work of 19th-century French fiction, which fans of du Maupassant, Flaubert and Louise de Vilmorin’s Madame de__ will likely enjoy.

In short, this charming picaresque tale takes the reader from the slum districts of Paris to the upper echelons of French society, with a story involving spectacular robberies, betrayal, capture, escape, reunion and unexpected marriages, all topped off by a surprising denouement. I’m delighted to see this back in print, courtesy of the Penguin Archive series.

The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington (1974 or ‘76)

Born in Lancashire in 1917, Leonora Carrington is perhaps now best known as a surrealist artist; however, during her career, she also wrote novels, short stories, a play and a memoir, all infused with her dreamlike, idiosyncratic worldview. First published in English in the mid-1970s but reputedly completed in 1950, The Hearing Trumpet is as unconventional as one might expect from this visionary creative – a surreal, subversive, wildly imaginative novella that challenges traditional patriarchal and ageist societal structures, turning them neatly on their heads in thrilling fashion. It is, by turns, hilarious, surprising, esoteric and poignant – a wonderful sui generis work that defies categorisation.

The novella is narrated by Marian Leatherby, a ninety-two-year-old woman who lives in Mexico with her family, who, in turn, consider her somewhat burdensome and eccentric. Before long, Marian is packed off to a care home, which turns out to be more sinister than it appears at first sight. Much is made of the seemingly ‘eccentric’ nature of elderly women here, a label often attached to marginalised individuals to explain away their unconventional qualities. Carrington, however, was well aware of the revolutionary potential of women who looked at the world differently, and as the novella unfolds, eccentricity is portrayed in a positive, liberating light as a rebellious force for good.

The Country of the Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett (1896)

First published in 1896 and recently reissued as part of the Penguin Archive series, The Country of the Pointed Firs is a classic example of literary regionalism, a genre of writing in which the local setting, landscape, history, community and customs are centre stage. Through a series of evocative vignettes, Jewett conveys a rich picture of everyday life in the fictional small-town community of Dunnet Landing on the east coast of Maine. It’s a gem of a book – reflective, affecting and beautifully crafted.

Central to the story is Jewett’s narrator, an unnamed female writer (possibly Jewett herself) who has come to Dunnet Landing for the summer to work on her writing. Through her landlady, Mrs Todd, who has lived in the area since her birth, the narrator is drawn into the lives of the local inhabitants – their stories and histories, preoccupations, and concerns. Something Jewett does particularly well here is to capture the traditional rhythms and rituals of life in this coastal community, the importance of female friendships and shared stories, resilience and independence, occasional family gatherings and reunions, nature and landscape. In short, it’s a gorgeous paean to ordinary lives well lived, where small acts of kindness and generosity brighten the spirits, easing some of the difficulties humanity must face.

So that’s it for my Books of the Year, 2025! Do let me know your thoughts on my choices – I’d love to hear your views.

Thanks so much to everyone who has read, commented or engaged with my thoughts on books over the past year. I really do appreciate it.

All that remains is to wish you all the very best for the festive season and the year ahead. Here’s to another great year of reading and more book chat in 2026!

Amongst Women by John McGahern

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Amongst Women, the fifth novel by the critically acclaimed Irish writer John McGahern, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1990, missing out to A. S. Byatt’s Possession in the final cut. Ostensibly the story of an ageing, tyrannical father, whose wife and daughters both love and fear him, the novel can be seen as a reflection of the deeply conservative nature of Irish society during much of the 20th century, a world dominated by stifling patriarchal power structures in which women were kept firmly in their place. Beautifully constructed in simple, unadorned prose, this is a superb character study – a minor masterpiece with an immersive sense of place.

Central to McGahern’s moving, acutely observed novel is Moran, a middle-aged widower in rural Ireland, who spends his days working the farm and tending the animals, falling in step with nature’s cyclical rhythms. As a young man, Moran commanded an IRA column in the Irish War of Independence, garnering the respect of those who served under him. A subsequent falling out with those in charge led to his departure from the army, and while money remained tight, he refused to take a military pension due to stubbornness and resentment. Consequently, Moran is now rather isolated from the surrounding community, shunning any interference from outside or sentimental reminiscences of the past. 

He had never been able to deal with the outside. All his dealings had been with himself and that larger self of family which had been thrown together by marriage or accident: he had never been able to go out from his shell of self. (p. 12)

This is a world in which family and religion are everything, the bedrock of civilisation and respectable Irish society. (We are in the 1950s/‘60s here, a time when Ireland was deeply conservative, wedded to traditional values and draconian views on discipline.) Consequently, Moran rules his conservative, deeply religious household with an iron fist.

Following a brief opening section, which comes full circle by the novel’s end, we are quickly introduced to Moran’s family – his three daughters, Maggie, Mona and Sheila, and their younger brother, Michael – all living at home on the Great Meadow farm. There is another son too, the headstrong but hardworking Luke, who now lives in London following a falling out with his father. Despite his success in London, carving out a burgeoning career for himself in a thriving property development business, the estranged Luke is a lost cause as far as Moran is concerned, and his name is rarely mentioned in the house.

As McGahern lays out his stall, we quickly sense the mood at Great Meadow, which Moran’s high moral standards and fiery temper invariably dictate.

Though Maggie was eighteen, tall and attractive, she was still as much in awe of Moron as when she had been a child. Mona, two years younger, was the more likely to clash with him, but this day she agreed to be ruled by Maggie’s acquiescence. Sheila, a year younger still, was too self-centred and bright ever to challenge authority on poor ground and she pretended to be sick in order to escape the tension of the day. Alone, the two girls were playful as they went about their tasks, mischievous at times, even carefully boisterous; but as soon as their father came in they would sink into a beseeching drabness, cower as close to being invisible as they could. (p. 8)

The story follows the family members as they age and develop, perhaps most notably with the arrival of Rose, who becomes Moran’s second wife. McGahern devotes significant time to the couple’s courtship, which is beautifully observed, Rose knowing full well that she will have to do virtually all the running to secure Moran’s hand in marriage. In truth, Rose is the saving grace of the household, tempering her husband’s potential for flare-ups on several occasions. Luckily the children are extremely fond of this new arrival, welcoming her into their home and appreciating her compassion as a counterbalance to Moran’s bitterness.

Rose and the girls smiled as the tea and the plates circled around him. They were already conspirators. They were mastered and yet they were controlling together what they were mastered by. (p. 46)

Nevertheless, Rose too comes in for criticism from this exacting patriarch, occasionally grating on his nerves with her lively chatter. For the most part, she absorbs her husband’s violent outbursts and truculent moods, making excuses for his temper; but inevitably, there are occasions when Moran goes too far, causing Rose to withdraw to her room, visibly hurt.

Often when talking with the girls she [Rose] had noticed that whenever Moran entered the room silence and deadness would fall on them […] If they had to stay they moved about the place like shadows. Only when they dropped or rattled something, the startled way they would look towards Moran, did the nervous tension of what it took to glide about so silently show. Rose had noticed this and she had put it down to the awe and respect in which the man she so loved was held, and she was loath to see differently now. She had chosen Moran, had married him against convention and her family. All her vanity was in question. The violence Moran had turned on her she chose to ignore; to let her own resentment drop and to join the girls as they stole about so that their presence would never challenge his. (p. 53)

At heart, Moran is strictly old-school, a proud man who rarely shows his emotions; any demonstrations of pleasure, pride or effusive praise are considered weaknesses or too vulgar, partly because they would likely invite jealousy or dismissal from other members of the community. For instance, when Sheila is offered a scholarship to study medicine at university, Moran fails to make a fuss, deliberately withholding his approval of the opportunity. Consequently, his tacit disapproval prompts Sheila to accept a steady civil service position instead, something Moran considers more suited to his youngest daughter’s level despite her academic brilliance at school. Naturally, Sheila resents her father’s lack of support here, especially at first, but she soon accepts his judgement as being for the best. As a modern-day reader, it is infuriating to see Moran smothering his daughter’s ambitions in this way. Nevertheless, this is an accurate representation of Irish society at the time; I know this from my own family’s experiences and those of their contemporaries.

Despite his many failings, Moran is loved and revered by all his daughters, who remain both terrified of him and desperately eager for his approval and respect. It is to McGahern’s great credit that he portrays this aspect of the Moran family dynamics in such a nuanced and authentic way.

Young Michael, on the other hand, is more rebellious, leaving school early and falling in with a twenty-two-year-old Irish girl, Nell, back from the US with money to burn. Michael’s transgressions are eventually uncovered, prompting a violent confrontation between Moran and his youngest son. Consequently, Michael flees the nest in terror, highlighting Moran’s reluctance to forgive and forget.

One by one, the children move away from Great Meadow — Maggie to London where she trains as a nurse; Mona and Sheila to civil service jobs in Dublin; and Michael to London where he falls for an older English woman — leaving Moran and Rose to take care of the farm. Nevertheless, the core family unit continues to exert a strong pull on the children, especially the girls, with Mona and Sheila returning home to the farm every other weekend and Maggie visiting twice a year, especially around harvest time.

These visits of his daughters from London and Dublin were to flow like relief through the house. They brought distraction, something to look forward to, something to mull over after they had gone. Above all they brought the bracing breath of the outside, an outside Moran refused to accept unless it came from the family. Without it there would have been an ingrown wilting. (p. 93)

Even Michael is willing to go back and make his peace with Moran despite the previous trouble.

As in any family, various developments and dramas ensue. There are courtships and marriages, the arrival of grandchildren and regular trips home to visit Great Meadow. Nevertheless, McGahern’s primary concerns are character, family dynamics and an immersive sense of place rather than high drama and plot.

Something McGahern does particularly well here is to illustrate how each member of the family responds to Moran’s strict expectations and dominance within the unit. The girls feel a strong sense of attachment to their father, looking to him for recognition and confirmation of their continued existence. While Maggie and Mona are broadly accepting of Moran’s iron rule, Sheila will only follow suit on certain terms. She knows the family is crucial to her existence, reinforced by a deep sense of belonging to the home; nevertheless, following her marriage, she will not allow herself to be used or destroyed by it. Michael on the other hand, oscillates between casual acceptance and determined rebellion, the latter softening with the passage of time. Only Luke seems steadfast in his total rejection of Moran’s conservative, patriarchal values, continuing to hold out even as the advancing years take their toll. This strained relationship with Luke is a persistent source of anger and irritation for Moran, particularly as the boy shows no signs of wanting to visit home or update the family with his news. Consequently, Moran considers his eldest son ungrateful, inconsiderate, and not worth bothering about. Meanwhile, Rose demonstrates near-total compliance with Moran’s volatile behaviour, exhibiting only the occasional show of hurt.

In beautiful, understated prose, McGahern explores the tensions that lie at the heart of this eminently relatable family, subtly questioning the moral virtues of patriarchal power structures at the heart of Irish society. While Moran once thrived in the violent, masculine world of the IRA, he is much less at home in the domestic arena, unable to demonstrate the affection and compassion his family truly deserve. The book’s title has a dual meaning, reflecting both the largely female household Moran finds himself in and a significant line (‘blessed art though amongst women’) from the Hail Mary section of the Rosary prayers, which he leads on a daily basis, marshalling his family to chant without fail.

As this masterful novel draws to a close, there is a release of sorts as the family members gather at Great Meadow, watching over the ailing Moran as he confronts his own mortality. While in theory, his death will leave Rose and the children free to live on their own terms, unencumbered by the patriarch’s authoritarian rule, one suspects that Moran will continue to cast a shadow over the family long after his death.

I adored this subtle, beautifully observed book, which feels so well suited to fans of William Trevor, Colm Tóibín, Claire Keegan and Dierdre Madden, all of whom have an innate ability to see into the hearts and minds of their characters with insight and precision, laying bare their deepest preoccupations and insecurities for the reader to see. Very highly recommended indeed.

Amongst Women is published by Faber; personal copy.

Openings by Lucy Caldwell

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Three years ago, I read and loved Intimacies, an insightful, beautifully written collection of stories by the award-winning, Belfast-born writer Lucy Caldwell. (I genuinely think she is one of the best short-story writers working today.)

While Intimacies focused on pregnancy and the early years of motherhood, Caldwell’s latest collection, Openings, seems more concerned with a slightly later stage of parenthood – again, predominantly from the female perspective. Here we see women grappling with the demands of a more established family, balancing the challenges of motherhood with their own personal desires as they enter middle age. (There are other preoccupations, too, which I’ll try to touch on later in this review.) Irrespective of the connecting themes, it’s another excellent collection of short fiction – subtler and more ambitious in style than Intimacies, reflecting Caldwell’s ongoing development as a writer with a strong command of her craft.

These are quiet, understated stories, often focusing on everyday preoccupations and concerns. (Readers seeking plot-driven stories that turn on unexpected twists will be better served elsewhere.) Nevertheless, what marks these stories out is their subtle insight, humanity and emotional truthfulness. Caldwell has a genuine ability to convey feelings that are often difficult to articulate or remain unexpressed, such as fear, loss, isolation, estrangement and the unsettling nature of change. In particular, she writes insightfully about how parenthood can trigger a multitude of emotions, from joy, pride and fulfilment to doubt, uncertainty, protectiveness and fear.

Some stories feature mothers assailed by childhood memories of their own maternal care while also trying to cope with motherhood themselves – in other words, how our past experiences of being mothered reflect on the here and now. In Mother’s Day, one of the most affecting stories in the collection, a married woman with two young sons must come to terms with her mother’s devastating actions many years before, while also worrying if she might follow suit.

I turned forty. Here I was: exactly the age she’d been, and we were getting closer to what I always privately thought of as my mother’s day. I started to have the recurring dream that plagues me at that time of year – every year since her death I’ve had it, without fail, and it builds in frequency and intensity until I wake up sweating, even screaming. (p. 228)

It’s an excellent story, highlighting how profoundly our childhood experiences can continue to haunt us, shaping our mindsets as we navigate adulthood.

In Something’s Coming, a married woman has persuaded her husband and their two young sons to come on a simple family holiday to Ireland, just like those she remembers from her youth. The trip is also a chance for the couple to reconnect, to have time to talk without juggling childcare and work commitments in the hubbub of London life.

As the story opens, the family are lost in the middle of nowhere, caught in inclement weather, their tempers fraying. At one point, the narrator is reminded of her deceased mother, whom she misses deeply, blurring the borders between motherhood and childhood, albeit momentarily.

‘Isn’t this an adventure,’ I said brightly. I raised my voice above the noise of the car and the wind and the rain to say it, and the voice that came out wasn’t mine: it was my mum’s. For a vertiginous second she was me and I was a child again and it was impossible that I’d grown up, married, somehow had kids of my own – impossible that I ever would do so. The car seemed to stop moving. Everything seemed to stop as if none of it, this, was real. (p. 35)

As this very unsettling story unfolds, the narrator is haunted by creepy doll her sons picked up in a local shop, tapping into suppressed fears she tries to keep hidden…

In Cuddies, Caldwell explores motherhood from a somewhat different but equally interesting angle. In this piece, a married woman whose life is devoted to her three young daughters is persuaded by her husband to join a friend’s 40th birthday weekend, albeit rather reluctantly. The arrival of children has dramatically altered the nature of this couple’s marriage, so much so that the wife, who narrates the story, can barely remember the last time they had sex. While her husband sees parenthood as a short-term interruption to their earlier spontaneous lifestyle, the narrator takes a different perspective, viewing her current world as enriched by the children. The use of the phrase ‘in theory’ feels curcial in the following quote.

My husband had wanted children as much as I did, in theory. But he’d only reluctantly agreed to a third – and was adamant that we wouldn’t, couldn’t possibly, have a fourth. He was impatient now for these baby years to be over: still thought, or hoped, that they were just us on pause, a sort of limbo, after which we’d pick up where we left off, without realising that, for me, that could only ever be a diminishment. (p. 143)

As the weekend unfolds, the narrator experiences something unexpected, a release of sorts that ultimately reawakens a desire for deeper intimacy with her husband – hopefully setting their marriage on a better path going forward.

In Bibi, my favourite story in the collection, we see another type of mothering as a young woman, Beatrice, goes on holiday with her newish boyfriend, Justin, a widower who is fifteen years older. Also there are Justin’s three daughters, who lost their mother to cancer five years before. As Beatrice tries to figure out her place in this family – Can she do this? Will the girls accept her? – she is forced to take sides when a disagreement breaks out. This superb story, brilliantly constructed and paced, ends on an open but hopeful note, hinting at the girls’ acceptance of Beatrice within the family unit.

The titular story, Openings, sees a recently separated mother navigating a new relationship with her children’s father as they begin to share childcare responsibilities, while in Dark Matters, an unmarried particle physicist working at CERN – clearly the brains of the family – visits his dying mother in Ireland as she faces palliative care. Despite the melancholy theme, this absorbing story is laced with a lovely seam of humour, showcasing Caldwell’s ear for dialogue that sounds authentic and true.

‘Talking of school. I rang them up, so I did, and said you’d go in and talk to them.’

‘Why? About what?’

‘Och, sure, what do you think! About physics! About CERN and that. Don’t be looking at me like that. How often is it that someone from these parts works on a par with Einstein?’

‘I don’t work on a par with Einstein, Mum. I train computer programs to analyse and replicate mathematical datasets so we can see if there are anomalies that might be worthy of further analysis.’

‘It’s no point trying to explain it to me, sure my head’s melted. Anyways, they’re delighted to have you. Tomorrow, I said you’d be in, eleven o’clock.’ (p. 60)

Elsewhere, we have Daylight Raids, a wonderful story of two lovers meeting illicitly in the early weeks of the Blitz, vividly rendered in an evocative modernist style. 

No sleep. For nights on end, no sleep. The mournful howl of the all-clear, and stumbling home through defamiliarised streets, the sandbags, the fires, the smoke, the buses toppled into craters, the collapse of damaged buildings right before you in a sudden and terrible rush. The dust, the glass, the piles of litter in the street, the burst water mains, the stench, the soot. (p. 118)

The story revolves around Constance, an ARP warden, who, despite being married with a young son, is embroiled in a tender affair with Robert, a longstanding friend. While her husband, Henry, goes about his war work in the Ministry of Information, Constance slips away to meet her lover whenever their schedules allow. There is a sense of hopelessness about this affair, playing out as it does against the backdrop of bombed-out houses and the turmoil of the Blitz. Constance knows it cannot last, and yet she yearns to be with Robert, who releases desires in her that Henry cannot reach. It is daring, she knows, but the payoff justifies the risk.

It is reckless, Constance knows. Henry may have telephoned her sector post to find she was not on duty after all and so she will have to make up a story, something suitably alarming, the rush to a public air raid shelter, its metal bunks and warm and foetid air, and he will have been worried beyond belief, and it is unconscionable, and scares her, the hard, cold, unfamiliar part of her that is able, that is willing, to do this. (p. 129)

Interestingly, Caldwell brings a metafictional dimension to this piece by inserting an authorial voice into the narrative, commenting on her development process, touching on what we know about the characters as the story is unfolding.

Overall, then, Openings is another excellent short-story collection by one of Northern Ireland’s finest writers. Nuanced, understated and compassionate, these stories are full of emotional insight, giving voice to feelings that sometimes remain unexpressed. There is light amid the shade here, a sense of lives evolving, frequently opening out into new or different phases.

Openings is published by Faber; my thanks to the publishers for kindly providing a review copy, which I read for February’s #ReadIndies.

One by One in the Darkness by Deirdre Madden  

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Last year, I read and loved Molly Fox’s Birthday, my first novel by the critically acclaimed Irish writer Deirdre Madden. It’s a beautifully observed story about identity, friendship and private vs public selves, characterised by Madden’s deep insights into character conveyed through quiet, unshowy prose. These qualities are also evident in her 1996 novel One by One in the Darkness, which explores The Troubles in Northern Ireland through the lens of a Catholic family – Charlie and Emily Quinn and their three daughters, Helen, Cate/Kate and Sally. It’s an excellent book that gradually reveals its hand, showing how past traumas and losses inevitably shape the present.

Madden uses an interesting structure to tell her story, alternating between the novel’s present day (set in 1994) and key events from the past, largely focusing on the 1960s and early ‘70s when the sisters were children.  

All three sisters are grown up now, and their lives have taken different paths, very much reflecting their individual personalities. Helen, the eldest of the three, is a successful lawyer in Belfast, where much of her work involves representing those caught up in terrorist activities. Idealistic, austere and self-contained, Helen has thrown herself into her job, travelling home at weekends to the family farm near Ballymena where her mother and youngest sister still live.

Glamorous middle sister Cate, who works in London for a fashion magazine, usually visits Ballymena only once a year, but now she’s back with some important news to share – something she knows will upset the family, especially her mother. To Emily’s dismay, Cate has changed how she spells her birth name (originally ‘Kate’) in the hope of making her Irish heritage less obvious to friends and work colleagues in the UK, mainly as a consequence of The Troubles.

Rounding out the group is Sally, the youngest and most accommodating of the Quinn sisters, now a teacher at the local primary school. (The girls’ mother, Emily, also trained to be a teacher but gave up any thoughts of having a career when she married Charlie, a decision that still causes tensions within the extended Quinn family.) Living at home with Emily, Sally often puts others’ needs before her own desires. Nevertheless, despite being the frailest and most compliant of the three sisters when young, Sally has an inner steeliness and knows just how to manage each member of the family when Cate reveals her news.

Cate knew Helen thought her life was full of empty glamour, that she spent more time thinking about cellulite and waterproof mascara than was actually the case. Cate herself viewed Helen’s job as a solicitor specialising in terrorist cases and working out of an office above an off-licence on the lower Falls with a kind of horror. Both Helen and Cate wondered how Sally endured the tedium of her life as a teacher in the primary school they had all attended as children; and yet past a certain point none of this mattered. They were sisters, and that was enough. (pp. 8–9)

While the three sisters are very different from one another, they are bound together by strong family ties and shared experiences, particularly the fallout from the circumstances surrounding their father’s violent death two years ago.

As Madden fleshes out the sisters’ childhoods through flashbacks, a moving portrait of close family life emerges, punctuated by the seasons and special occasions. Their lives are small in scope but enriched by the warmth of a loving family despite the inevitable squabbles.

For the pattern of their lives was as predictable as the seasons. The regular round of necessity was broken by celebrations and feasts: Christmas, Easter, family birthdays. The scope of their lives was tiny but it was profound, and to them, it was immense. The physical bounds of their world were confined to little more than a few fields and houses, but they knew these places with the deep unconscious knowledge that a bird or a fox might have for its habitat. The idea of home was something they lived so completely that they would have been at a loss to define it. (pp. 74- 75)

Madden is particularly astute at portraying family dynamics and tensions, how petty jealousies and resentments can manifest themselves in taunts designed to undermine someone’s confidence, especially where aspirations and life choices are concerned. Relations have cooled between Emily and her mother, Granny Kelly, largely due to Emily’s marriage to Charlie. Granny Kelly still disapproves of her daughter’s decision to give up her job as a teacher in Belfast after the wedding, but Emily knew she had no other option back then – it simply wasn’t possible for married women (especially those in Ireland) to have it all. Consequently, the atmosphere in Granny Kelly’s house could not be more different to the warmth projected by the sisters’ paternal grandmother, Granny Kate, a fun-loving, well-dressed woman who delights in showing off her outfits at church.

Tea in Granny Kelly’s house didn’t count as real food, it was just another exercise to make sure you knew the rules, and that you kept them, too. You had to have a respectable number of sandwiches before you could have something sweet, and then you had to choose the most unappealing biscuit on the plate, unless urged to go for something nicer (which you almost never were). Helen dreaded being given no option but to eat a piece of Aunt Rosemary’s seed cake ever since the day Kate had remarked that not only did it look like it had mouse shit in it, it tasted like it too. (p. 39)

As the years slip by, the political tensions underpinning The Troubles close in, making the turmoil feel increasingly close to home. While the girls’ father, Charlie, is principled but level-headed, his brother, Brian, is much more reactionary and committed to the Republican cause, often attending marches irrespective of the risks. Meanwhile, other unnerving developments take place in the neighbourhood: a schoolfriend’s brother is killed planting a bomb; military checkpoints and searches become routine; British soldiers visit the Quinn’s home to identify everyone present; and perhaps most hurtful of all, Protestant workers will no longer do business with the Quinns (it’s simply not safe for them to be seen in a Catholic neighbourhood, never mind the family’s house).

Everybody was afraid now. People were being abducted and killed; sometimes shot, sometimes beaten to death or mutilated with knives. Bombs exploded, often without warning, killing or maiming anyone who had the misfortune to be near by. A parked, empty car, even on a deserted country road, was now a thing to be feared. (p. 131)

The novel also touches on the challenges of reporting killings in such a politically sensitive environment, how the facts can get twisted or selectively reported to craft a particular narrative irrespective of the truth. It’s something that cuts particularly deep for Cate, especially when she realises that some of her London work colleagues have made incorrect assumptions about her father’s political leanings based on media reports of his death.

But worst of all had been the British tabloids, where the death was reported coldly and without sympathy, much being made of Brian’s Sinn Fein membership, and the murder having taken place in his house. The inference was that he [Cate’s father] had only got what was coming to him. (p. 47)

The challenge of balancing honesty and authenticity against the myriad of emotional sensitivities is another important consideration here. Madden hints at the circumstances surrounding Charlie’s death at an early stage in the novel, but the full horror and injustice of the killing really hit home by the end.

As the family adjust to Cate’s news, there are hints of a new beginning for the Quinn family, some signs of hope and renewal for a brighter future ahead.

Madden has crafted an understated, beautifully observed novel grounded in authenticity – a moving intertwining of the personal and political that will likely resonate with anyone touched by The Troubles. Recommended reading, particularly for readers interested in this period of social history, seen through the lens of character-driven fiction.

One by One in the Darkness is published by Faber and Faber; personal copy.

A Bit on the Side by William Trevor

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William Trevor is one of my all-time favourite authors. He writes beautifully about small-town Irish life, often focusing on the quiet moments other writers might overlook. His short stories are spellbinding – humane, compassionate, and suffused with melancholy. In particular, he has an innate ability to see into the hearts and minds of his characters with insight and precision, laying bare their deepest feelings for the reader to see.

First published in 2004, A Bit on the Side comprises twelve beautifully observed stories – quietly devastating glimpses of life with the power to endure. Usually, when reviewing short collections, I make the point that some stories will resonate more strongly than others; but on this occasion, every single story included here is a gem. Here we have stories of families, husbands and wives, current lovers and former partners, achingly sad portrayals that will linger in the mind.

The collection opens with ‘Sitting with the Dead’, in which Emily, a newly widowed woman, reveals all the details of her abusive marriage to two strangers from the Legion of Mary, a religious charity who call unannounced to sit and offer comfort.

It was always that: raising his voice, the expressions he used; not once, not ever, had there been violence. Yet often she had wished that there had been, believing that violence would have been easier to bear then the power of his articulated anger. It was power she had always felt coming from him, festering and then released, his denial of his failure. (p. 9)

As Emily sits by the body, all the hurt and fear she experienced with her husband comes tumbling out, contrasting with the callers’ best efforts to keep the conversation civil.

A strong sense of loneliness and isolation permeates these stories, punctuated by moments of hope, understanding or compassion. In ‘An Evening Out’, one of my favourites in this collection, a man and woman, both middle-aged, meet for a blind date arranged by a match-making agency. The woman – well-dressed and refined – is seeking companionship, someone to accompany her on theatre trips and days out to the coast. The man, on the other hand, is more self-centred and underhand. A food photographer by trade, he’s looking for a woman with a car, someone to transport him and his photographic equipment around London at weekends while he attends to his side project – photographing the city’s lesser-known areas for a coffee-table style book. Not that he lets on about any of this, of course. No…he’s far more furtive than that.

In the end, both parties realise there is no future in a potential relationship – they clearly move in very different worlds, and besides, it turns out that the woman doesn’t own a car.

His world was very different from hers, she added, knowing that she must not go on about hers, that it would be tedious to mention all sorts of things. Why should anyone be interested in her rejection more than twenty years ago of someone she had loved? Why should anyone be interested in knowing that she had done so, it seemed now, for no good reason beyond this shadow of doubt there’d been? A stranger would not see the face that she still saw, or hear the voice she heard; or understand why, afterwards, she had wanted no one else; or hear what, afterwards, had seemed to be a truth – that doubt played tricks in love’s confusion. (pp. 71-72)

Nevertheless, each party gets something out of the evening when it takes an unexpected turn. As ever with Trevor’s fiction, there is so much more that I could reveal about this story, but it would spoil the experience for potential readers, I think. Suffice it to say, some fascinating aspects of human nature are on display here, all beautifully observed.

‘Graillis’s Legacy’ is another standout, a beautiful, poignant story harking back to a nostalgic past some twenty years before. When Graillis, a widower who manages the local library, is notified of a substantial, unexpected inheritance, he is reluctant to accept the money. The deceased, an older woman he had met through the library, was clearly very special to him – not a lover as such, but a like-minded companion to bond with over books. Their lunches together were all perfectly innocent, of course; few personal details were exchanged, just a shared passion for writers such as E. M. Forster and Ford Madox Ford.

But in the drawing-room he had sat in so often in the autumn of 1979 and during the winter and spring that followed it, a friendship had developed over cigarettes, touches of lipstick on the cork tips that had accumulated in the ashtray with the goldfinch on it. That settled in his thoughts, still as a photograph, arrested with the clarity that today felt cruel. (p. 93)

Nevertheless, when his car was spotted several times near the woman’s house, people put tow and tow together and the townsfolk began to talk…

As Graillis wrestles with his feelings, he is bewildered by ‘the resurrection of a guilt that long ago had softened away to nothing’. Accepting the legacy now would feel like an admission of guilt – a confirmation of something illicit that had never actually happened. He’d like a little memento to remember the woman by, but the money would be too much (whatever would people say?). It’s a very poignant story, sensitively portrayed.

Other stories deal with hopes and dreams, people trying to carve out places for themselves in a turbulent, shifting world. In ‘Justina’s Priest’, Father Clohessy laments the decline of the church’s stature in society, the dwindling congregations and various misdemeanours that have sullied various reputations. He feels lost in this changing environment, uncertain what to say to his parishioners any more.

One day, when Father Clohessy hears something in confession – Justina, a young girl with learning difficulties, is planning to go to Dublin to visit an ‘unsuitable’ friend – he sees an opportunity to intervene.

She’d been the bane of the nuns when she’d attended the convent, sly and calculating, all knowing talk and unspoken defiance. She’d plastered herself with lipstick when she was older; in the end she born a T-shirt with an indecency on it. (p. 51)

Defying the sacred nature of the confessional, he goes to see Justina’s family, keen to exert his influence and maintain the status quo. It’s another excellent scenario which Trevor subtly explores.

In ‘Scared Statues’, a married woman whose family are very short of cash tries to find a creative solution to ease their financial worries. There’s another baby on the way, and the prospect of an additional mouth to feed is too much to bear. Meanwhile, a childless couple living nearby might welcome a new baby, so much so that they’d be willing to pay for it. As in several other stories here, Trevor creates a fascinating set-up, using it to explore the drivers of human behaviour and how the local community might view these actions (i.e. disapprovingly!).

‘Big Bucks’ has a hint of Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn about it; but in this instance, it’s a young man, John Michael, who goes in search of the American Dream, not a woman. Meanwhile, his fiancée, Fina, remains in Ireland, hoping to follow on once her man is settled. As the months pass, Fina finds herself drifting apart from her fiancé; in truth, it’s the allure of America she has fallen in love with, not John Michael himself.

Elsewhere in the collection, a girl attending private lessons in her tutor’s home realises the man’s wife is conducting an affair in the room above, while he is occupied downstairs. I loved this achingly sad story in which a man’s pain is slowly exposed. We also gain an insight into the girl’s feelings towards her tutor – a strange blend of awkwardness, guilt and compassion – as his situation becomes clear.

‘On the Streets’ is the darkest tale here, a particularly creepy story of a divorced man who stalks random women, including his ex-wife, Cheryl. The man – a disgruntled waiter, demoted to serving breakfasts following a customer complaint – bears a massive grudge against the complainant, which he finds impossible to shake. There’s so much going on in this one – stalking, kleptomania and a vicious attack. In fact, the latter isn’t entirely clear, partly because the man is a fantasist, which makes it tricky to separate what is real from what is imagined as he offloads his woes onto Cheryl. Another excellent story that deserves a second reading.

The collection closes on a high point with the titular piece, a masterclass in the less-is-more school of storytelling. In this story, we find ourselves observing the dying days of a longstanding love affair. A married man and his divorced lover meet three times a day: for breakfast in a favourite café before going their separate ways to work; then lunch in the park, or at a gallery when it rains; and finally, a quick drink in the same pub every evening before parting ways to catch their separate trains. She knows he will never leave his wife and family; nevertheless, these brief snatches of time together are enough for her.

As the story opens, the woman can sense that something is troubling her lover; they know one another well enough to pick up on these subtle changes in mood.

Something was different this morning; on the walk from Chiltern Street she had sensed, for an instant only, that their love affair was not as it had been yesterday. (p. 228)

Moreover, this ominous atmosphere only deepens as the days unfolds…

Not wanting to, and trying not to, he had passed on a mood that had begun in him, the gnawing of a disquiet he didn’t want to explain because he wasn’t able to, because he didn’t understand it. (p. 235)

As with ‘Gaillis’s Legacy’, this superb story rests on the perceptions of others, how society might view the lovers’ meetings, assuming their relationship to be a sordid, grubby affair – the ‘bit on the side’ encapsulated in the book’s title. Trevor shows us two people trapped in a landscape of loneliness, unable to be together because the man is bound by marital constraint. Moreover, the lovers cannot even enjoy these brief meetings for fear of how their relationship might be perceived.

What makes these stories resonate so strongly is Trevor’s compassion for his characters, how he treats them with grace and humanity irrespective of their failings. I adored these beautiful, deeply affecting stories of life’s small disappointments, limitations and regrets. They have a timeless, universal quality, marking Trevor out as one of best short-story writers of his generation.

A Bit on the Side is published by Penguin Books; personal copy.

Barcelona by Mary Costello

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The award-winning Irish writer Mary Costello seems equally at home with novels and short stories. Her deeply affecting novella, Academy Street, was one of my favourite reads in 2015, while her first collection of short fiction, The China Factory, has also been highly praised. Barcelona – Costello’s second story collection – comprises nine pieces exploring the distances between people, how fault lines can develop in the closest relationships, and our capacity for cruelty towards loved ones and animals. Here we have stories of husbands and wives, fathers and sons, and former lovers – quietly devastating snapshots of life, beautifully conveyed with insight and precision.

As is often the case with such collections, some stories will resonate more strongly than others, but the very best of these are outstanding, very much in the style of Claire Keegan’s and William Trevor’s short fiction. Interestingly, several of these stories feature people in transit – on a city break in Barcelona, taking the Eurostar to Paris or accompanying a deceased relative home for the funeral. Nevertheless, it’s the emotional journeys or realisations Costello’s characters experience that give these stories their depth.

In the titular piece, David and Catherine have travelled to Barcelona to celebrate their fourth wedding anniversary, but we soon learn that the trip was David’s idea – if anything, Catherine would have preferred Granada. Sadly, pretty much everything about the holiday serves to emphasise the disconnection Catherine feels in her marriage, from David’s reckless driving en route to the city to his choice of porn movies as ‘entertainment’ to his suggestion of catching a bullfight during their stay. It’s as if David is taunting Catherine, knowing full well her abhorrence of animal cruelty.

She looked at David’s waiting face. He was no longer mysterious to her. She watched him talking sometimes, eating and drinking with gusto, bouncing through life on the solid ground beneath him, and she was struck by the distance that exists between people. How everything, the details of everyone’s hidden life, far exceeds anything we can possibly imagine. (p. 6)

At the Gate explores a similar theme, highlighting the fault lines in a strained, stagnating marriage. In this piece, a literary teacher – whose surname is ‘Costello’ – travels with her husband, Peter, to see the South African writer J. M. Coetzee at a book festival. As Coetzee takes questions from the audience, Peter – who has little interest in books himself – becomes increasingly irritated by the speaker’s behaviour, triggering a series of disturbing visions for his wife. There are echoes of Coetzee’s novel Elizabeth Costello here, which seems to be a touchstone for Mary Costello’s advocacy of animal rights. 

In My Little Pyromaniac, a single woman realises she has moved next door to her former boyfriend, Kevin, and his new family. The woman, who also narrates the story, went out with Kevin while she was at university – but now, twenty years on, she has cause to recall her relationship with this man almost twenty years her senior.

There was something about Kevin – an arrogance, an authority, a furtiveness too. He was a man used to getting his own way, a man who might send out secret signs and demands to women, and expect them to acquiesce. (p. 56)

As the narrator observes Kevin mistreating the family pet, a beautiful German Shepherd, she realises how lucky she was to get away from him back then. Otherwise, she could be living this life now – that could be her house, her children and her dog on the other side of the fence. It’s a chilling thought, prompting the woman to take drastic action. It’s one of my favourite pieces in the collection, playing out with just the right amount of jeopardy and ambiguity as it draws to a close.

The standout story here is also the longest, a masterclass in construction and the gradual, measured reveal. Costello has an innate ability to portray a sense of separateness or alienation in a relationship, a skill she puts to excellent effect here. First published in the New Yorker, The Choc-Ice Woman focuses on Frances, a retired librarian in her mid-sixties, accompanying her deceased brother’s body on the drive from Dublin to the family’s farm in the country. In the silences between brief exchanges with the undertaker, Frances reflects on the key people in her life – most significantly, how her brother, Dennis (the deceased), withdrew from society in his youth, and her husband, Frank, whom she now knows to be a ‘serial adulterer’.

Service stations – along with shopping centres and suburban housing estates – were, Frances used to imagine, one of his pick-up spots for women. She’d picture him [Frank] parking off to the side, near the service area, with his tea and breakfast roll, the racing page open on the steering wheel, keeping an eye out for a lone woman emerging from the shop, then tracking her until she – game, like him, for a motorway fling – met his eye. (p. 78)

This brilliant, penetrating story taps into another couple of Costello’s key themes – namely, trust and the inscrutable nature of others. How well can we ever know those closest to us? What secrets are they concealing, and will we ever be able to trust them again? Frank’s covert behaviour has left Frances with a general mistrust of others, especially men. For all she knows, Mr O’Shea, the undertaker sitting next to her in the hearse, could be a serial adulterer, too.

Maybe you’re one too, she thought. If I were a different woman, younger, more attractive – or maybe not even attractive, but capable of giving off a certain signal – would he be game too? If I indicated availability and secreted the right pheromones he might at any minute exit the motorway, drive down a forest track or quiet lane – because he would know all the forest tracks and quiet lanes – and there might be some talk or laughter, and maybe a little awkwardness as he unbuckled, and then he would do it and I would let him, with my dead brother lying there, inches from our heads (p. 104)

Costello excels in treading the fine line between tragedy and black comedy here. There’s even a brief worry that the undertaker might have put the wrong body in Dennis’ coffin as the deceased looked younger than seventy-six, the age Frances happens to mention during the journey!

Fans of Costello’s Academy Street and Colm Tóbín’s Brooklyn will love Assignation, one of my favourite pieces in this collection. This melancholy story features Marion, an Irish girl working as a housemaid for a wealthy American family in NYC in the late 1930s. When a friend arranges a date for Marion with her cousin, Michael, Marion realises it might be her best chance of securing a marriage. But as the meeting approaches, a horrific incident from Marion’s past resurfaces, colouring her view of men and their unknowable qualities.

This is her chance. Michael Lawlor might be her only chance. But what does she know of him? She does not know if he is cruel or kind, or soft, or manly. She knows nothing of his private life, or the private life of any man. She takes a deep breath. He is, from what she knows, a good man. She will have a home, children. She will have fine rugs and velvet curtains. But how to get to that point, how to know what to do now, this minute. How to know what to say, when to smile, how to hide the shame. Because he will know. A man will know. (p. 126)

The collection ends with another standout story, The Killing Line, in which Oliver reflects on his deceased father’s life working the family farm. Oliver’s father, Paddy, was just thirteen when he left school to work the land, sacrificing his own promising future for the benefit of the family. So, while his siblings went to college, ultimately securing good jobs, Paddy missed out on a proper education, a handicap that often left him feeling exposed when the family were together.

Paddy always hoped that Oliver would join him on the farm, but a childhood trip to the abattoir left an inedible mark on the boy. Now with Paddy gone, Oliver’s mother chides her son for rejecting everything his father had stood for while alive. It’s an excellent story, a crushing exploration of the tensions between an individual’s personal values and beliefs – in this instance, animal rights – and familial pressures and obligations. A quietly devastating end to a very striking collection.

Barcelona is published by Canongate; my thanks to the publishers and Independent Alliance for kindly providing a review copy.

This Train is For by Bernie McGill

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Regular readers of this blog will be aware of my fondness for Irish writing from both sides of the border, the kind of quiet, understated fiction that William Trevor, Claire Keegan, Lucy Caldwell and Maeve Brennan have produced. Now I can add Derry’s Bernie McGill to my list of favourites, courtesy of this excellent collection of short stories, which scooped the Edge Hill Short Story Prize earlier this year.

Here we have stories infused with loss, where the past disrupts the present, foregrounding the fallout from longstanding trauma, disagreements and secrets we try to conceal. Interestingly, virtually all the standout stories here involve travel, reconnecting the protagonists with their families and troubling events from the past. Nevertheless, it’s the emotional journeys McGill’s characters undertake that give these pieces their humanity and depth. 

In the titular story, one of my favourites from the collection, an elderly man travels by train to see his estranged sister, who is nearing the end of her life. As the landscape slips by outside – a sequence of urban and rural scenes, each with a vivid sense of place – we learn the source of their longstanding estrangement, a bitter disagreement rooted in prejudice and political divides. 

This is what we do here: move forward while facing back, keeping a sharp eye on what has been, in case it gets a run on us, overtakes on our blind side. (p. 1)

A sibling reunion of sorts also features in ‘There is More Than One Word’ as a middle-aged woman, Jaynie, returns to Belfast to deal with the discovery of the remains of a man – possibly her brother, Paul, who went missing aged seventeen.

She has told the principal at her current school that her brother has died, that she needed leave to come home for the funeral. She hasn’t told him that between these two events is a gap of forty-seven years; that she isn’t certain there will be a burial; that she hopes there will, but that she couldn’t say for sure. It was too complicated to get into. (p. 24)

In this powerful story, Jaynie is haunted by the fear of the unknown, which manifests itself in a recurring, looping vision – the sense of a body being bundled into a car, a kidnapping or ambush, perhaps? Shadowy images that refuse to sharpen into focus before the sequence begins again.

Language plays a crucial part in both of these pieces. What did Paul do back then? What did he say (or not say) to antagonise his aggressors? What unspoken rules or codes were broken? With piercing insight, McGill suggests there can be no easy release from past traumas; instead, they continue to reverberate, taunting and unnerving us till the end of our days.

The fallout from traumatic incidents can be felt in several of the best stories here – not least in ‘A Fuss’, my favourite in the collection. As Rosa waits at Dublin’s Connolly Station, her thoughts turn to the days ahead and the time-honoured rituals the family will conduct to mark her father’s death.

They’ll sit side-by-side on borrowed chairs and sip tea out of china cups that haven’t seen daylight for years, not since her mother’s mother was waked. They’ll nibble at sandwiches that have arrived ready-made, packed into loaf bags, ferried in by neighbours; they’ll nod and shake hands and thank people for coming and agree that it’s a shock; they’ll search long-unseen faces for some clue to recognition and sit silent and bleary-eyed by the coffin during the lulls. (p. 98)

No one in Rosa’s family shows much emotion; they’re not the kind to make a fuss. But as this achingly sad story unfolds, we discover the devastating consequences of these character traits, how denial and suppression – largely to avoid a potential scandal – have scarred Rosa’s life indelibly. At first, Rosa is unsettled by a chance encounter with an eccentric lady at the station, an incident that ultimately highlights the joys of a more demonstrative family. Later in the journey, this chatty woman is openly embraced by her nephew on leaving the train; and as Rosa watches from her carriage, this simple reunion, full of warmth and affection, throws her painful, suppressed emotions into sharp relief.   

She [Rosa] doesn’t know if she’s crying for the little woman with the carpet bag heavy with condiments, or for her father who went out in the morning, not knowing he wouldn’t come back that day, or for her mother who will never get over this, no matter how attentive her relatives are, or for herself, for the lack of love in her life, because she hasn’t allowed it in. (p. 103)

It’s a brilliant story in the style of William Trevor, especially in its depiction of a life blighted for the sake of respectability.

Death also haunts ‘A Loss’, in which the tragic horrors of an elderly woman’s early life are revealed when her nephew clears out her home. A note, an old mattress and an anxious dog all come together to trigger long-buried childhood memories in this haunting, unsettling story of secrets and concealment.

I think of my aunt often, and wonder about her, and about the words that she wrote on that scrap of paper, words that must have been long in her head. And I marvel, not for the first time, at the secrets people keep, for themselves, and for others, at the sadnesses that betray them, and at the small quiet lives that they continue to live out until the end of their days. (p. 43)

Like many masters of the short-story form, McGill can see into her characters’ hearts and minds with insight and precision, laying bare their deepest preoccupations for the reader to see. Her stories are quiet, subtle and poetic, often conveying the hidden sadness of life. She bears witness to the small rituals and moments of solitude when everyday life must continue, despite the grief, suffering and loneliness we all experience from time to time.

Some of these stories seem deceptively simple on the surface, but as they unfurl, other, more poignant layers are revealed. ‘The House of the Quartered Door’ and ‘Glass Girl’ are excellent examples of this, both hinging on feelings of guilt and notes of ambiguity.

Despite the melancholy tone, there are moments of brightness here, too. ‘The Snagging List’ is rife with humour, unfolding through a series of text messages between two thirty-something women, close friends since childhood. As the messages fly back and forth, a note of poignancy is ultimately revealed, putting a different slant on each character’s situation. It’s a clever story showing a different string to McGill’s bow, a welcome addition to this accomplished collection.

Others are flecked with a different brand of humour – the wry or dry kind that works so well. In ‘The Cure for Too Much Feeling’, a menopausal woman develops a susceptibility to other people’s sorrows, which she tries to manage by avoiding likely triggers. News reports are a major hazard, not to mention bus journeys, open fires and pubs!

She tuned in to Classical FM, though she had to be careful around a violin solo. (p. 121)

The collection ends with an intriguing story, ‘In the Interests of Wonder’, in which a schoolteacher provides tuition for an illusionist’s daughter when a travelling fair comes to town. It’s another story where fear of outsiders or ‘others’ breeds suspicion, mistrust and misguided accusations, scuppering potential relationships for those concerned. An excellent finish to a lyrical collection I’m pleased to recommend.

This Train is For is published by No Alibis Press; personal copy.

Molly Fox’s Birthday by Deirdre Madden

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This excellent, beautifully observed novel about identity, friendship and private vs public selves is my first experience of Deirdre Madden’s work; but on the strength of its quiet, unshowy prose and deep insights into character, I will certainly be seeking out more.

Madden’s unnamed narrator – a successful playwright born in Northern Ireland but now living in London – is staying at the Dublin home of her close friend, Molly Fox, while Molly is in New York. The two women have been good friends for around twenty years, ever since Molly – a brilliant actress with a remarkable, distinctive voice – starred in the narrator’s first play, which propelled them both to fame.

As the narrator struggles to crystallise the vision for her new play, she reflects on her life and the relationships she has developed with Molly and others over the years – most notably, her old college friend, Andrew, now a successful art historian and TV presenter comfortable in his own skin; her eldest brother, Tom, a gentle Catholic priest who shares his sister’s interest in the arts; and Molly’s troubled brother, Fergus, who has long suffered intense periods of depression and alcoholism. Many of these memories are triggered by the myriad of possessions in Molly’s modest terraced house, tastefully furnished with interesting pieces acquired over the years. Tasteful that is apart from the absurd fibreglass cow installed in the back garden – a piece so out of kilter with the rest of Molly’s furnishings that the narrator begins to wonder if she knows her friend at all.

I realise that a certain school of thought says that who we are is something we construct for ourselves. We build our self out of what we think we remember, what we believe to be true about our life; and the possessions we gather around us are supposedly a part of this, that we are, to some extent, what we own. (pp. 37–38)

While the narrator has long resisted this idea of the self, partly due to her Catholic upbringing, the realisations that surface during the day challenge her previous beliefs, particularly around Molly – a woman who appears mousy and introverted in polite company but utterly compelling on stage. From her first visit to the theatre as a teenager, Molly understood that the key to being a great actor was to become the character – to inhabit them fully, rather than imitating them. A technique that requires the actor to distance themselves from their own personality and sense of self.

Central to the novel are questions about our private versus public selves. How well do we really know someone, even when we consider them to be a close friend? Who is Molly Fox when she is alone and unobserved, and how does this differ from the person others see when she is elsewhere, e.g. rehearsing in the theatre, meeting fans or socialising with friends? Through the novel’s elegant framework – which unfolds over one day, Molly’s birthday – Madden explores the often-contradictory personalities we adopt in public and private settings.

Madden is excellent on the limits of friendship, the rules of the game, the areas we keep protected and the things we reveal. As the narrator muses over her relationship with Molly, she comes to realise that friendship is not necessarily a clear insight into another person’s psyche but a more clouded vision through which only certain aspects of their world can be gleaned.

The closer you get to Molly, the more she seems to recede. Sometimes she seems to me like a figure in a painting, the true likeness of a woman, but as you approach the canvas the image breaks up, becomes fragmented into the colours, the brushstrokes and the daubs of paint from which the thing itself is constructed. Only by withdrawing can the illusion be effected again. Molly wants to remain remote. (p. 126)

Molly has an unnerving habit of dropping earth-shattering nuggets of information into general conversation as casual, throwaway remarks. Moreover, these bombshells – often covering her earlier life – are delivered when any follow-up discussion or questioning is nigh-on impossible to conduct, leaving the listener reeling as a result. In a fascinating scene, Molly reveals a pivotal event from her 7th birthday, illuminating her fractured upbringing, the intense disdain she holds for her mother, and her fierce protectiveness towards Fergus.

While the narrator’s college friend, Andrew, has also distanced himself from his family, there is no hint of artifice about his personality now he has found his true self. Rather, it is the scruffy, disgruntled student the narrator recalls from her Trinity College days who seems unreal, not the successful TV presenter Andrew is today. If anything, his transformation feels entirely natural and unforced.

There was nothing fake about him, nothing false. It was instead as if he was at last becoming himself, becoming the kind of person he needed to be, the person he really was. It was the tense, prickly man I’d known at college who had been the fake. (p. 68)

The old Andrew was angry with his parents for favouring his brother, Billy, a loyalist paramilitary who was abducted and murdered in Belfast during a politically-motivated feud. In short, their mother never forgave Andrew for being the one left alive when Billy was killed, despite Andrew’s lack of involvement in The Troubles. Only years later, on becoming a father himself, could Andrew appreciate the depth of his parents’ grief over the loss of a much-loved son.

Interestingly, the narrator is also something of a misfit in her own family, although unlike the others, her familial relationships are warm and loving. She is closest to her brother, Tom, the Catholic priest, whom Molly also turns to for guidance – a private friendship which doesn’t include the narrator.

Perhaps most insightful of all is an unexpected encounter between the narrator and Molly’s brother, Fergus, who turns up unexpectedly at the house. As they sit in the garden and talk, the narrator discovers a whole new side to Fergus – a gentle, compassionate, witty and intelligent man, far from the helpless failure she had taken him for before.

Molly. I thought she had won through in life, whilst Fergus was defeated, broken. Now it seemed to me that things were perhaps quite the opposite, and her brother’s woes notwithstanding, Molly was the one who really hadn’t come to terms with the past, who was still bitter about it in a way that was corrosive and did more harm to her than to anyone else. (p.156)

Alongside identity, friendship, family and our private vs public selves, the novel also touches on a number of other topics, including the religious and political divisions within Northern Ireland, familial ties vs personal independence and walking away vs living a lie. Memorialisation is another significant theme. How, for instance, do we remember those who have died or moved on? What is the purpose of memorials, and who are they for – the living or the dead? It’s a topic of great relevance to Andrew, who now sees his brother’s signet ring as a treasured object of remembrance, not the gaudy, embarrassing object it once was.

In summary, this is a marvellous novel – the kind of book where nothing seems to happen, and yet everything is there, just waiting to be uncovered as the layers are peeled away. I’ll finish with a final quote about the tenuous nature of friendship. Here. the narrator reflects on a chance encounter with another old college friend, Marian, whom she hasn’t seen for several years.

Meeting her had been a dispiriting experience, as it so often can be when one meets old friends. The initial delight, the sense of connection, and then the distancing, the unravelling of that connection as information is exchanged and it becomes clear why one hasn’t stayed in touch. Defensiveness sets in, and it all ends in melancholy when one is alone again. (p. 106)

(Molly Fox’s Birthday is published by Faber and Faber; personal copy. This is my first review for Cathy’s Reading Ireland project, which runs throughout March.)

Soldier Sailor by Claire Kilroy

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Earlier this year, I was feeling a little underwhelmed by much of the new fiction I had been reading. There were of course some notable exceptions – books such as Kathryn Scanlan’s remarkable novella Kick the Latch and Benjamin Wood’s underrated The Young Accomplice, to name just two. But other well-reviewed novels left me hoping for more. No such worries with Claire Kilroy’s Soldier Sailor, a novel so authentic, intense and visceral it feels like this year’s My Phantoms – the lack of a Booker longlisting only adding to this view.

We are in the early months of motherhood here, an unrelenting fug of exhausting, mindless days and fraught, sleep-deprived nights. The novel is conveyed through an extraordinary monologue as the mother, Soldier, addresses her four-year-old son, Sailor, almost in the form of a confessional. (I couldn’t help but be reminded of the brilliant Forbidden Notebook by Alba de Céspedes here.) What Kilroy does so brilliantly is to immerse the reader in Soldier’s life as a new mother, laying bare her struggles with parenting and hopes for the future while peppering these revelations with flashes of dark humour. It’s a cutting, razor-sharp wit born out of desperation, raw with the pain of frustration from the challenges she’s been facing.

In short, Soldier’s life has become so small, a world of stupid, meaningless ‘stuff’ from changing nappies and peeling veg to trying to manage the supermarket shop with a cranky baby in tow. A lethal combination of sleep deprivation and a lack of mental stimulation has kicked in, leaving Soldier lonely, exhausted and lost, subsumed with resentment for the person she has been forced to become – a person she doesn’t like or recognise, a distortion of her former self.

Soldier’s husband – whose work is clearly more important than the trivial business of childrearing – comes home from work increasingly late, shirking all responsibilities for parenting apart from relishing in the beauty of his baby by proclaiming, ‘How’s my little man?’. Meanwhile, the relentless minutiae of motherhood has erased Soldier’s sense of self, dominating her life to the detriment of her mental health.

‘Bye bye, Dadda,’ I said on your behalf, waving your little hand. Your father kissed us both before closing the door, a guillotine severing me from my world. Which is not to say that your father was my world, but that he was free to roam in my world, which we should now call his world, or perhaps the world, an adult place from which I’d been banished. Now I lived in your world. It was small. (p. 40)

Getting a baby fed, cleaned, dressed and ready to leave the house is a major strategic operation, especially when they pull off their socks more quickly than you can put them on! There are several painful scenes involving tantrums in the supermarket, rows between Soldier and her husband in IKEA or in the car, and tussles over toys at the dreaded Mother and Toddler Group – itself a microcosm of competitive middle-class society. Nevertheless, Kilroy invests these set pieces with a rare combination of authenticity, honesty and pitch-black comedy. The line between just-about-coping and not-coping-at-all is desperately thin.

‘You should bring him to that,’ concluded the Child Developmental Specialist [Soldier’s husband]. ‘Socialise him,’ he added, a word he had picked up from me.

I had been talking about socialising you at the Baby and Toddler group for weeks although now apparently it was his idea. Problem was I couldn’t get out of the house on time. It was difficult to explain the obstacles to my husband because they weren’t obstacles he recognised. They weren’t obstacles I’d recognise before having you, the whole, three-steps-forwards, two-steps-back racket. Since becoming mobile, you could undo faster than I could do. (pp. 37–38)

Meanwhile, her husband’s life has not changed one iota. In fact, if anything, his quality of life has improved. He comes home to a clean house, is served dinner each night and has all the time in the world for his gym training. The only thing he has little appetite for is helping with the childcare.

While Soldier’s husband is always there in some capacity to see when things are going wrong, he never seems able to offer any support or practical help. And if Soldier does give him something simple to do, such as the bedtime routine or a nappy change, he seems to mess it up, meaning Soldier must intervene herself. Consequently, the man of the house loses face and complains of being undermined by his wife. It’s a no-win situation for Soldier, however she plays it.

Instead, the husband chimes in by stating the bleeding obvious, pointing out where his wife is going wrong. The trouble is, she knows this herself, but the practical solutions are easier said than done. It’s perfectly simple for him to pass judgement on his wife’s approach to parenting — an approach he often finds wanting — but much harder to deliver excellent care in practice, especially when a toddler is flexing his free will.

‘I don’t understand why you didn’t bring him to the doctor, that’s all.’ He [Soldier’s husband] used to do that all the time, swoop in like the senior consultant to pass judgement on his junior doctor, whom he always found wanting.

‘Look, if the level of care I am giving our son is unsatisfactory, feel free to step in. Feel free to do a whole ten minutes of parenting. Don’t let me stop you.’

By this point, we were both standing over your sleeping body in the cot. Your father, the Professor of Paediatrics, was down on his hunkers examining the bump in relief. (p. 72)

Moreover, Soldier is acutely aware that her youth is ebbing away with motherhood set to dictate her life for the next 12 to 15 years. While standing in the playground, she realises that her ‘time on the swing’ has come and gone; other, younger girls are flying now, embracing life with all its delights and opportunities. No more smart clothes and high heels for Soldier; instead, she must schlep around the kitchen in her far-from-glamorous slippers.

Something else Kilroy does so effectively here is to capture the seemingly continual tension between overwhelming frustration/annoyance with your child and the inherent desire to protect them from harm to the point of being willing to kill others – or even yourself! – to ward off significant threats. For instance, the sheer panic of losing a child in the supermarket is brilliantly conveyed – an experience every parent dreads when temporarily distracted.

There is nothing a mother would not do to protect her child from harm. She would kill others for him, she would kill her husband, she would kill herself. (p. 18)

There are other hazards and near-misses too: the ultra-sharp knife that drops on the kitchen floor while Sailor plays with his toys; the moving swing that narrowly misses his head while playing in the park; the buggy that rolls into the road as Soldier battles with an umbrella. (Naturally, the fancy chopping knife is part of an expensive set purchased by Soldier’s husband – ‘man toys’ the man of the house has never used because his wife does all the cooking!)

Then, one day, Soldier is thrown a lifeline when she bumps into an old friend in the park. He’s now a stay-at-home dad with three beautiful children – all friendly and relatively well-behaved. Suddenly, she can have adult conversations with someone who understands the myriad of challenges involved in parenting – and, thank goodness, someone who seems to have got the whole childcare thing down pat. Amazing!

As the children’s play dates in the park continue, this man encourages Soldier, helping her re-establish certain elements of the person she was before, boosting her confidence and self-worth in ways she so desperately needs. It’s a hopeful turning point in this emotional roller-coaster of a read.

Throughout the novel, Kilroy only shows us the mother’s view of these situations; we never hear from the father directly, only Soldier’s take on his behaviour; consequently, one might query the narrator’s reliability. But as other reviewers have mentioned, that’s almost beside the point. To Soldier, this experience is real; it feels visceral and authentic. I’ve never experienced motherhood first-hand, but from everything I’ve seen through the experiences of friends and family, Soldier’s emotions are utterly relatable. An outstanding powerhouse of a novel, easily one of my books of the year.

Soldier Sailor is published by Faber & Faber; my thanks to the Independent Alliance and the publisher for kindly providing a reading copy.