March 23, 2023 by Claire 'Word by Word'

Trespasses by Louise Kennedy

Trespasses Louise Kennedy Set in Northern Ireland during ‘The Troubles’, in the mid 1970’s, Trespasses began with what seemed like a chance encounter, when a known barrister, Michael Agnew, a married man of the opposite faith, a Protestant, known to provide legal defence to IRA members; a man who had known Cushla’s father, sat at the bar, while she was serving, engaging her in stilted conversation.

There are various types that frequent the pub, that one ought to be wary of, an aura of menace seems never far away. This man Michael asks her questions, coming across initially, to this reader, as a suspicious character. Yet, there is a chemistry between the two.

Cushla, 26 years old, is a teacher of primary school aged children and helps her brother in the family owned bar some evenings due to the deterioration of their mother into alcoholism. Much of her spare time is spent caring for her mother, trying to prevent something more than drunkenness from occurring.

Absent Father, Alcoholic Mother, A Rescuer Desires Love

We know the father has passed on, though we know little of the relationship dynamic he brought to the family, except that he was regarded as having married beneath him. He was a Lavery, a prominent family name. His wife, Cushla’s mother Gina, was always seen as ‘less then’, something Cushla has inherited, grown up with and allowed to define her, without a full appreciation of.

She has a soft spot for one of her pupils, Davy McGeown, she knows his mother is struggling with three small children, a wayward 18 year old son and a troubled husband. Her attempt to cut them some slack, to try and get the school to provide Davy school lunches brings the family unwanted attention. Moved by their need, her instinct is to get involved and help.

Friends and Lovers

Her colleague Gerry invites her out. He seems to be her one true friend, the only person she can rely on. But it is towards the older, in almost every way unavailable, Michael, she yearns.

The novel traces the early days of their doomed affair, displaying all the classic signs of being something to the side of one’s life, except that for her, she desires more. Though he takes her to his Irish conversation social gathering, the way his friends act is less than welcoming. Much of their connection, irrespective of their age and religious differences is frowned upon everywhere, it seems impossible and she wonders if she is just one in a line of other women.

News, Bad News, Terror and Scares

Photo by S.DiMatteo Pexels.com

Each chapter begins with a radio news announcement, a politically motivated violent event, a death, a bombing, a recounting of damage, injuries, blame.

Every school day too begins with recounting the news, the children have no chance of not knowing the charged political climate around them, often their school events are interrupted by random police checks, a bomb-scare.

Those Trespasses

There are lines that should not be crossed, there are consequences unseen, random events that require little imagination to see how they might unfold. There are ordinary, dsyfunctional trysts and risky choices of career, that occur in all cultures and societies, but in some the punishment for what another might consider to be a transgression are more severe than others.

The lack of love in Cushla’s life might be what leads her to cross these lines, to defy convention without being the rebellious type. We don’t know much about Michael or why he made the decisions he did; he set out to protect some, which could disturb others, and his choices would make the women in his life suffer.

A Collision Course

Ultimately the connections Cushla has made will collide and demonstrate how easy it can be for one of those radio announcements to no longer be a mere repetition of the way life is, in a country where sectarian violence is normalised.

It is a sad depiction of life and an interesting novel to discuss, as it reinforces the necessity for so many to choose to leave, when their options and opportunities close on them.

Entrance to Titanic Museum, modern day Northern Ireland

In this respect I was reminded a little of Michelle Gallen’s recent novel Factory Girls, where another young woman, in her naivety finds doors closing permanently, as she too leaves Northern Ireland.

I enjoyed how this all came together in the latter part of the novel, when it suddenly picks up pace, energy and suspense; I found the initial two thirds less engaging and too many pages given to the affair that could have more usefully been given to greater character development, that might have evoked greater empathy for some of the characters and the situation.

The depiction of the tense atmosphere and some of the revealing anecdotes that demonstrate the prejudices and slights people have against one another were incredibly well done and somewhat eye-opening, the result of a continued separation of people and a belief in their own self-made differences.

It left me with quite a few questions; however it was a thought provoking read, about an unsettling place and time, that remains something of an enigma to the outside world.

I read this during March 2023 for #ReadingIrelandMonth23

Louise Kennedy, Author

Louise Kennedy grew up in Holywood, Country Down, a few miles from Belfast.

Her stories have appeared in literary journals including The Stinging Fly, The Tangerine, Banshee, Awsfiri and Ambit and she has written for the guardian, Irish Times, BBC Radio 4 and rTE radio 1.

Her work has won prizes and she was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Audible short story award in both 2019 and 2020. Her short story collection The End of the World is a Cul de Sac was published in 2021.

Trespasses has been longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2023. It won the An Post Irish Book Awards Novel of 2022 for

Before starting her writing career, she spent nearly 30 years working as a chef. She lives in Sligo with her husband and children.

A World of Love by Elizabeth Bowen

I read A World of Love by Elizabeth Bowen for Reading Ireland Month 2023, during the week of Classics at Cathy’s 746Books.

O’Brien versus Bowen, A Fair Comparison?

A World of Love Elisabeth Bowen Having just read and loved Edna O’Brien’s trilogy The Country Girls, written a mere 5 years later than this novella, I thought I would easily get through this. They lived in the same country and both wrote in the English language, however they were worlds apart in their use of language, their choice of protagonist and place.

There is a 30 year difference in age, but while O’Brien writes with lucidity and frankness (too frank for many, thus her work was initially banned) Bowen writes with unfathomable verbiage that obfuscates the narrative and left me wondering what this had been about.

A World of Love? I think not.

War Changes Everything

A young man who would have owned a grand Anglo-Irish house, inconveniently dies in World War I, leaving a fiance Lilia, who sadly has no status having not yet married him, and a cousin Antonia, who will inherit the mansion. Needing a farm worker to run the place and perhaps feeling sorry for Lilia, Antonia brings these two together, they marry and have two girls, Jane and Maud.

One summer 20-year-old Jane pokes around the attic and discovers a bundle of letters folded into an old dress. There are a few conversations that circle the letters, though rarely address them – which is a little like the tone of the novel, people speak and avoid all the issues.

The Importance of Community

Photo by Y. Koppens on Pexels.com

There is an annual festival, which should be a day of excitement, and for Jane it is, but it is the only community event the family ever participate in, they are isolated and out of touch with the everyday reality of other lives, living in the shadow of the past, of a future that never manifested.

Ultimately, we learn that this family, like the muslin dress and the letters folded away in it, are living a life suspended between the past and the present, one that Jane, who is in the peak of her youth, clearly wants to bust out of. Her finding the dress and the letters is a sign of much needed change, something that disrupts the stagnant air of an old house, arrested in time.

Times Pass, Youth Reinvents the Present

When Jane descends wearing the musty, antique dress, a symbol of the past, Antonia gestures for it to be taken away, while Jane insists the presence of the sachets suggest it was meant to be worn again.

‘No, on the contrary – no, it had had its funeral. Delicious hour for somebody, packing away her youth. Last looks at it, pangs, perhaps tears even. Then down with the lid!’

‘What, does youth really end with a bang, like that?’

‘It used to. Better if it still did.’

Antonia, as so often, spoke into nothing – for Jane, not awaiting the answer to her idle question, had got back up and gone to the looking-glass. There she stood, back turned to the bed, searching impersonally for the picture Antonia had failed to care to find or for the meaning of the picture, without which there could be no picture at all. ‘What egotists the dead seem to be,’ she said. ‘This summery lovely muslin not to be worn again, because she could not? Why not imagine me?’ She stepped back on to a flounce of the hem, which tore. ‘Who’d she have been? she wondered, roping the fullness round her to see the damage.

Old fashioned manor house novel boarding house

Photo by Skitterphoto on Pexels.com

In the last two pages, there is the arrival of a guest at the airport, an indicator that change is afoot.

It has taken me a few days to sit with this novella and reflect on what it might have been about, to be able to write anything about it.

For me the characters were under developed, not much of note or intrigue happened, and though there was this theme of stagnation and the dying out of a breed versus the presence of youth that wants to break through all of that, there were too many unnecessary words used to describe that which does occur, that made for a frustrating reading experience.

The Rebel Protagonist

It reminded me a little of a similar feeling I had reading another Anglo-Irish novel set in a big house, Molly Keane’s Good Behaviour, it seems I don’t particularly enjoy reading novels about misanthropes sitting around in big manor houses.

I admit that classics I do enjoy, tend to feature more rebellious protagonists, like Colette’s Claudine at School, Claudine in Paris, Claudine Married and Claudine and Annie or Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse, Nella Larsen’s Passing and Quicksand, and Jane Bowles Two Serious Ladies and the excellent Fire in the Blood by Irène Némirovsky.

Do you have any favourite classics of a certain type?

Reading Ireland 2023

This week, its contemporary fiction for Reading Ireland and I’m planning to read Louise Kennedy’s Trespasses, which was the winner of the 2022 An Post Irish Book Awards Novel of The Year and was just longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2023.

Irish Literature Classic Contemporary Nonfiction

March 7, 2023 by Claire 'Word by Word'

The Country Girls Trilogy by Edna O’Brien

This week for Reading Ireland Month 23 the theme is classics. Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls is part of the Irish literary canon, a novel (and trilogy) it was an international bestseller when first published in 1960, that initially provoked controversy in Ireland.

More than a Trilogy, A Pillow Book

The trilogy consists of three novels: The Country Girls (1960), The Lonely Girl (1962), and Girls in Their Married Bliss (1964). It was re-released in 1986 in a single volume including a revised ending to Girls in Their Married Bliss and the addition of an epilogue.

While it recounts the three phases in the girls’ lives, childhood, young adult and married women; it is also a commentary on how childhood pain and deprivation can arrest an individual’s development, turning life into a series of repetitive unresolved patterns that mimic the past, rather than providing opportunity for learning, improvement and positive change that new experiences can bring. All this within the context of moving from girl to womanhood in Ireland.

It takes the particular role and perspective of women, who dream of romance, independence and freedom, and then encounter selfish male desire, religious restriction and judgement and oppressive cultural conditioning that deepen the wounds and further diminish hope of rising above them. Through their marginalization, it explores themes of loss, identity and loneliness.

I have depicted women in lonely, desperate, and often humiliated situations, very often the butt of men and almost always searching for an emotional catharsis that does not come. This is my territory and one that I know from hard-earned experience. Edna O’Brien (Roth, 1984, p. 6)

A Transgression of Boundaries, Daring to Expose Home Truths

In the course of creating a frank narrative that mines the girls naivety, flaws and failed attempts to find love and happiness, O’Brien presents her characters openly and honestly, unveiling how situations occur and who is complicit, something the literary establishment and the state abhorred, for Ireland has a history of blaming and incarcerating girls and women for many of her evils. The book(s) risked undermining the nation’s ideal perception of innocent and pious Irish girlhood. They were punished.

Photo by Lerone Pieters Pexels.com

The Country Girls was the first of six of O’Brien’s novels that the Irish Censorship Board would judge “indecent and obscene under section 7(a) of the Censorship of Publications Act, 1946.” It would also be banned in Australia and New Zealand, but was nevertheless enthusiastically received elsewhere in the Anglophone world. The book has never been out of print.

The novellas are semi-autobiographical. Edna O’Brien grew up on a farm in County Clare. Her alcoholic father drank away the farm and the family’s money.

Her ambition to write was scorned by her husband, Ernest Gebler, an older screenplay writer and documentary filmmaker. There have been comparisons made to the French author Colette, not least due to the similarity in spousal attitude – initially O’Brien’s husband believed he deserved credit for helping her become an accomplished writer, intensely jealous of her success, Gébler came to believe he was the author of O’Brien’s books.

While in no way salacious, the novels are unsparing in their depiction of cruelty, privation, filth, misery, exploitation, and violence, creating a tapestry of themes for future scholars to delve into, for book clubs and readers groups to discuss, in search of answers to questions of the Irish psyche, identity and inter-generational trauma.

Book #1 The Country Girls

Classic Irish Literature 1960 Childhood in the west Irish countryside, early adulthood in a boarding house in Dublin, marriage in London; the three books follow the lives of two girls Caithleen (Kate) and Bridget (Baba), who were neighbours, school friends and boarding house room mates. Though they were not girls who had much in common personality wise, they had a shared history; without that connection, their lives might have been much worse.

She had been nice to me for several weeks since Mama died, but when there were other girls around she always made little of me.

Caitheen loses her mother early on, in a drowning accident and spends time at her friend Baba’s house, due to the drunken binges her father goes on, his erratic behaviour causing them to lose their home and their financial security.

I was never safe in my thoughts, because when I thought of things I was afraid. So I visited people every day, and not once did I go over the road to look at our own house.

A scholarship helps her to attain an education, but Baba’s idea to get them expelled so they can be free, cuts short any opportunity Cait may have had to rise above the shop girl she will become. Though she had the capacity for higher learning, no one encouraged it.

Baba’s home life had been more carefree, her father was the local vet, her mother laid back. She yearned not for much, was used to home comforts and getting her own way. She could be unkind and had little empathy for others, she happily insulted her friend, was shallow, manipulative, less intelligent and avoided trouble unless using it for a specific outcome. She wanted to have fun and be entertained, free of consequence. She was a brazen character that had no issue subverting protocol, religious values and hypocrisy. A ruthless entitled survivor.

Dublin initially provides the girls freedom and excitement, a neon fairyland, it promises much to look forward to.

Forever more I would be restless for crowds and lights and noise. I had gone from sad noises, the lonely rain pelting on the galvanized roof of the chicken house; the moans of a cow in the night, when her calf was being born under a tree.

The first book is their coming-of-age, into this atmosphere of loss arrives one overly friendly neighbour Mr Gentleman, a married man who inappropriately eyes up the vulnerable young Caithleen, offering her a ride into town, buying her lunch, indulging her with first time experiences that attempt to make up for the loss and lack of love she has felt, not realising she is prey, knowing only how the attention makes her feel. It is the beginning of a pattern of disappointments concerning men in her life.

The girls move to Dublin marks the beginning of their search for love, a husband; with little or no guidance or protection than each other, they venture forth like lambs to the patriarchal slaughter.

Book #2 The Lonely Girl

The Lonely Girl Edna OBrien Caithleen meets Eugene, something about him (half foreign, older man) reminds her of Mr Gentleman, whom she hasn’t seen for two years. The girls now live in Joanna and Gustav’s boarding house and become like family in this house, sometimes confiding in Joanna, who struggles to maintain rules and boundaries with the girls.

For once I was not lonely, because I was with someone I wanted to be with.

They have one rough friend Body, who is one of the few they can rely on to escort them to dances. Neither of them are in relationships, but Caithleen yearns for the enigmatic Eugene. News of this ‘dangerous man’ travels to her father in an anonymous letter.

One sadness recalls another: I stood there beside the new, crumpled coat and remembered the night my mother was drowned and how I clung to the foolish hope that it was all a mistake and that she would walk into the room, asking people why they mourned her. I prayed that he would not be married.

He brings her home and she is forced to have an audience with the bishop – to encounter a divorced man is the worst kind of ‘fall’ from grace, thus all kinds of terrible things are going to befall her in the afterlife.

“Divorce is worse than murder,” my aunt had always said- I would never forget it; that and their staring disapproval.

Running towards Eugene brings out all her insecurities and yearnings, her lack of purpose. His age, his independence, career, worldliness, his friends – all are far from her reality. She finds some kind of comfort in his detached way of caring for her. In her immaturity, she desires to be pursued by him, as if to prove his love. It backfires, she will again feel the wound of abandonment, having acted out its consequence, the clingy holding on, the fear of disconnection and imagining potential threats to their relationship. In her pain and deepest wish, she leaves him – wishing to be pursued – only to re-experience rejection inherent in abandonment.

Baba tells Caithleen she is leaving for London, Baba has always been loved, but she does not use this strength to foster good in her relationships. She exhibits an emotional superiority that has inflated her self-esteem. Easily bored she entertains herself through extrovert behaviour and belittling others, she is decisive because she rarely compromises.

Book #3 Girls in Their Married Bliss

The Country Girls Trilogy Again time passes, so that when we encounter the girls next, they are on the cusp of marriage. Caith (now Kate) will marry the one who abandoned her and Baba, a man who can provide for her in the manner she craves. One desires love, the other security. Sadly, there’s not much in the way of bliss.

The third book has a different feel as it is the only one narrated by Baba, so there is more of distance from Kate, who we view in the third person.

She had plans for them both to leave their husbands one day when they’d accumulated furs and diamonds, just as once she had planned that they would meet and marry rich men and live in houses with bottle of grog opened, and unopened, on silver trays.

The girls drift away from each other and then come back as their lives hit various ups and downs. To some extent Kate is fulfilled by her son, but the disintegration of the relationship with her husband sets up more loss and abandonment in her life.

These are novels written in 1960’s that hold nothing back, they explore the psychological depths of these two young women who grew up in a conservative Ireland, with its social problems and moral expectations, which little equipped young women pushed from the nest into the world of destructive vice and little virtue, in their arrested development.

She said it was the emptiness that was the worst, the void.

I really enjoyed them all and find it astounding that they were banned, they provide such a rich foundation for discussion and understanding the very slowly evolving situation for young women growing up in Ireland.

Edna O’Brien, Author

Edna O’Brien was born in December 1930 in Tuamgraney, County Clare. She has written over 20 works of fiction.

In addition to The Country Girls trilogy, her novels include A Pagan Place (1970), the story of a girl growing up in rural Ireland, winner of the Yorkshire Post Book of the Year Award; Zee & Co (1972); Johnny I Hardly Knew You (1977), a story of love, murder and revenge; Time and Tide (1992), winner of a Writers’ Guild Award, the story of a young wife who faces a crisis when she leaves her husband and is forced to fight for the custody of her sons.

She is the author of a trilogy of novels about modern Ireland: House of Splendid Isolation (1994), she writes about Irish nationalism and sectarian violence; Down by the River (1996), based on the true story of a young Irish rape victim forced to travel to England for a legal abortion; and Wild Decembers (1999), about a farmer, Joseph Brennan, and his sister, Breege, living in an isolated rural community. In the Forest (2002), is based on the true story of a disturbed, abused young man who murdered a young mother, her infant son and a Catholic priest in the west of Ireland in the early 1990s. The Light of Evening (2006) and Byron in Love (2009), Haunted (2010), The Little Red Chairs (2016), Girl (2020), Joyce’s Women (2022).

She wrote Mother Ireland (1976), a travelogue with photographs by Fergus Bourke, and a biography of James Joyce, published in 1999. She is the author of several plays. In 2021 she was awarded the French Ordre des Arts et Des Lettres. She has lived in London for many years.

“I wanted to write from as far back as I can recall. Words seemed and still seem an alchemy, and story the true conductor of life, of lives.”

March 1, 2023 by Claire 'Word by Word'

Factory Girls by Michelle Gallen

It’s the first day of March and the beginning of Reading Ireland Month 2023, which I am kicking off with a review of a work of comedy by Michelle Gallen originally published in 2022.

Women Writing Comedy

I was completely charmed by Big Girl, Small Town with its comic Northern Irish vernacular, so I was looking forward to this next novel which I picked up on seeing that she has again been shortlisted for the Comedy Women in Print Prize UK/Ireland.

She is a writer that makes me laugh out loud while reading, a rare quality indeed.

A Summer Job, Awaiting Results

Factory Girls is a story that takes place over the summer of 1994, while three friends, living in an unnamed northern Irish town, await their exam results and confirmed university placements, and therefore the trajectory of their future lives.

They have taken a job in a shirt factory, and two of the girls Maeve and Caroline have rented a small two bedroom apartment opposite. Maeve, who is the main protagonist of the novel, aspires to study journalism in London, Aoife has her sights on Cambridge and Caroline, Magee.

Maeve has studied hard to ensure she attains the results that will enable her to escape her suffocating home life, the empty bed and stifling sadness surrounding her sister’s premature death and the continued menace of simmering violence that pervades the divided community they live in.

Family Dynamics and Social Standing

Though they attended the same school, they each come from different family dynamics and these differences over the course of the summer begin to play into how they perceive and respond to the various situations that will arise.

They receive a different kind of education over the next two months as they enter a rare ‘mixed’ workplace, where Catholics and Protestants work side by side, despite the overhanging external threat of sectarian violence. The girls learn how to navigate an adult work environment, discover what they miss when living independently and witness how life plans can change drastically overnight.

“Maeve hated how women’s clothes came in extra small, small, medium and large

while men’s shirts came in medium, large and extra-large

– like there was no such thing as a small man.”

All three of the girls will be confronted with the need to adapt their expectations, in this humorous yet serious and insightful look at Northern Irish society on the cusp of peacetime.

Perpetuating the Divide

It is an interesting work that reads simply on the surface, but exposes various minute behaviours that contribute to creating a sense of the divide and how it is perpetuated by members of the community. For all that Maeve wishes to escape it, she views the ‘Prods‘ with suspicion, uncertainty and denial of her feelings. It makes for strange reading, as the separation between the groups feels illogical to a reader from outside. To her credit, Maeve has learned that the two sides do have a couple of things in common – they both got excited about payday and liked talking about the weather.

It reminded me of an episode in series 2 of Derry Girls – The Difference Between Protestants and Catholics when a group of Catholic school girls go on a supervised weekend retreat with a group of Protestant school boys and they were asked to brainstorm things the two groups had in common. All anyone could suggest were differences. At the end of the exercise one side of the blackboard was empty and the other full.

Literally, I was so intrigued, I rewound and put the screen on pause, so I could learn how they perceived themselves to be so different – because it is such a mystery to the outside world. The blackboard scene is already considered a television classic and the recreated blackboard went on display in the Ulster museum in Belfast. It also gave rise to the soundbite of the season, according to The Irish Times: ‘Protestants keep toasters in cupboards’.

The Difference Between Protestants and Catholics

In Factory Girls, there is language they use to describe each other, like ‘Prods‘ and ‘Taigs‘ and referring to the Republic of Ireland as the ‘Free State‘; there is Maeve’s suppression of the sexual chemistry between her and the English boss Andy, relationships let alone attraction to the other side is forbidden; the subtle labeling of venues, which are deemed okay for one side or the other, making it difficult when the boss wants to treat his employees to celebratory drinks after work – it seems there is no place where all can be comfortable.

Overall, an entertaining read that somehow manages to bring humour to a not very comical situation, something that the Irish excel at and Michelle Gallen most definitely. I can well imagine both her novels on the small screen and they both lend themselves to potential sequels!

Michelle Gallen, Author

Michelle Gallen Big Girl Small Town Irish Fiction

Photo: Brideen Baxter & Deci Gallen/Simpletapestry.com

Michelle Gallen was born in County Tyrone in the mid 70’s and grew up during the Troubles a few miles from the border between the ‘Free State’ and the ‘United Kingdom’.

“The border between these territories dominated all our lives. In the late 1960s, 19 roads criss-crossed Donegal and Tyrone in our local area. By the 1970s, just one ‘official’ road was left usable after the British Army blew up and barricaded the ‘unapproved’ roads and bridges. This campaign dramatically impacted communities on both sides of the border throughout my childhood and teens.”

Her debut, Big Girl Small Town was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award, the Comedy Women In Print award, an Irish Book Award and the Kate O’Brien Award. Factory Girls has been shortlisted for the Comedy Women In Print award, the winner will be announced on 17 April 2023. She currently lives in Dublin with her husband and children.

You can discover her favourite books and reading influences here.

Irish Literature Classic Contemporary Nonfiction

February 24, 2023 by Claire 'Word by Word'

Reading Ireland Month 2023, A Wish List

Looking ahead, March is Reading Ireland month over at Cathy746Books, so I’m putting together what is currently on my shelf and what is lurking in the depths of my kindle, which I seem to have been more reluctant to read from lately, so a month of focusing on Irish literature should help.

Irish Literature Classic Contemporary Nonfiction
Cathy has set out a program below for the five weeks that focuses on classics, contemporary works (where most of my titles sit), short stories and non fiction.

Eager Anticipation

I had been looking forward to reading Sara Baume’s Seven Steeples, having read her excellent nonfiction title Handiwork, and two other novels, Spill Simmer Falter Wither and A Line Made by Walking – however I couldn’t wait and read it earlier this month. Highly recommended literary fiction, with a strong tendency toward poetic prose.

Intro Week: 1 – 5 March

I’m going to try and read the Edna O’Brien trilogy The Country Girls in the first week, which I have in one volume, but I will post as the three separate books. Originally published in 1960, 1962 and 1964, they are a portrait of youth, marriage, friendship, love and loss and I’m very excited to read this author for the first time and to begin here. She is hailed as one of the great chroniclers of the female experience in the twentieth century.

I managed to acquire a hardback of her 1994 novel, House of Splendid Isolation, which would be great to read if time allows.

Irish Classics Week: 6 -12 March

I have the novella A World of Love (1954) by Elisabeth Bowen, which should be possible to read in week 2.

I’m putting Brian Moore into this category, I have 3 of his novels on my shelf, a continuation, having read five of his novels for the 100th centenary in 2021. A previously neglected Irish author, he lived most of his adult life in Canada and the U.S., thus his literary output was created from the perspective of an outsider, looking back at his own culture, and occasionally at other cultures where he spent time, such as The Statement (1995), a political thriller set in France and The Magician’s Wife (1997), historical fiction set in France and Algeria, both of which take an aspect of French history that he found fascinating, turning them into compelling stories.

I have The Temptation of Eileen Hughes (1981), a Belfast love triangle, Black Robe (1985), a Jesuit missionary in North America in the 17th century, and The Mangan Inheritance (1979), a recently widowed man in Canada journeys to track down an Irish ancestor.

Contemporary Irish Week: 13 – 19 March

In this 3rd week, I shall attempt one or two of these novels from the kindle.

Trespasses by Louise Kennedy – this novel has garnered much praise since publication, set in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, a shattering novel about a young woman caught between allegiance to community and a dangerous passion.

Factory Girls by Michelle Gallen – I loved her novel Big Girl, Small Town and this latest has just been shortlisted for the Comedy Women in Print Award 2022/23 UK/Ireland. This is a definite, she makes me laugh out loud!

The Quiet Whispers Never Stop Olivia Fitzsimons – a dual narrative set in 1982 & 1994 Ireland, exploring the mother-daughter relationship; described as “A story of love, obsession and escape, an uncompromising, lyrical tour-de-force that marks the arrival of an extraordinary new voice in Irish fiction”.

Listening Still Anne Griffin – her debut When All is Said was a runaway international success, a book I enjoyed about a man who toasts 5 friends of importance to him. Her second book is about a young woman who can hear the last words of the dead, though it hasn’t made the same impact on readers; she has a new book due out on 27 Apr 2023 The Island of Longing about the disappearance of a daughter and a mother’s difficulty in accepting her loss, not knowing whether she is alive or dead. This latest is getting many 5 star reviews (from those reading an advance copy), one to watch.

A Traveller at the Gates of Wisdom John Boyne – an unknown man leads the reader through 2000 years of human and family history, slipping through time and space with slightly different identities, continuing on the same path, from Palestine in AD 1 to the year 2080 in a space colony. An ambitious and epic concept, a story that has had mixed reviews.

#ReadingIreland2023

Short Story Week: 20 – 26 March

I have this one collection that I shall try to get to read:

Dance Move by Wendy Erskine – stories set in Northern Ireland, where we meet characters looking to wrest control of their lives, only to find themselves defined by a moment in their past that marked them. In these stories – as in real life – the funny, the tender and the devastating go hand in hand. Full of warmth, the familiar and the strange, they are about what it means to live in the world, how far you can end up from where you came from, and what it means to look back.

Non- Fiction Week: 27 – 31 March

Cacophony of Bone Kerri ni dochartaigh I don’t have any Irish nonfiction left unread on my shelf, but I have noted that creative nonfiction author Kerri ní Dochartaigh, whose debut Thin Places I read in 2021 and enjoyed immensely, has a follow up book due out in April 2023, Cacophony of Bones.

It maps the circle of a year – a journey from one place to another, field notes of a life – from one winter, to the next. It is a telling of a changed life, in a changed world – and it is about all that does not change, that which simply keeps on – living and breathing, nesting and dying – in spite of it all.

I would also recommend in this category, the excellent collection of essays The Passenger Ireland – one of my Top Reads in 2022

Literary Inspiration

Dublin One City One Read Irish Literature If you are looking for inspiration, check out Cathy’s blog, where she shares a list of 100 Irish Novels from Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift (1726) to Here Are The Young Men by Rob Doyle (2014) and 100 Novels by Irish Women Writers from the Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph by Frances Sheridan (1761) to Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney (2017).

You can check out the One Dublin, One Book challenge – each year an invitation to read an Irish book in April. Last year, I joined in and read the excellent Nora, A Love Story of Nora and James Joyce by Nuala O’Connor.

In April 2023, they will be reading The Coroner’s Daughter by Andrew Hughes.

Alternatively, check out my posts:

My Year of Irish Literature – 2021 Highlights

My Top 5 Irish Fiction & Nonfiction Books

Have you read and enjoyed any of the titles here? Are you planning on reading any Irish literature in March? If so, what are you looking forward to reading? Do you have a favourite Irish author or book? Let me know in the comments below.

Happy Reading Ireland if you join in!

February 4, 2023 by Claire 'Word by Word'

Seven Steeples by Sara Baume

Call It Baumish Prose

There’s a kind of magic in the poetic prose of Irish author Sara Baume, something uniquely identifiable, that you know you are in the presence of within a few pages.

Irish literary fiction poetic prose My first encounter was her nonfiction title Handiwork, one I highly recommend as a starting place to her work and style. This title is like a spring board into her fiction, an introduction to the visual artist, the poet, the keen observer and storyteller.

Seven Steeples feels like a levelling up in confidence, it casts aside the idea that a novel requires a plot; if there is one, it might be the ever present question, addressed in the first sentence of each chapter, of another passing year, will the mountain be climbed?

The Irony – A Misanthropic Romantic Encounter

Bell and Sigh meet at an outing with mutual friends and fall into step together. Soon they are moving out of their respective lodgings to a house in the country, in the south-west of Ireland; flanked by a mountain, near the sea, opposite a field where bullocks roam, neighbours to a dairy farmer and his black and white cows. They have a dog each, Voss and Pip. There is a van. A tree in the backyard.

They say there is a wild goat who lives up there, the landlord said, the last surviving member of an indigenous flock.
They say that from the top, the landlord said,
you can see
seven standing stones, seven schools,
and seven steeples.

Bell and Sigh avoid humankind as much as possible, letting go of social and family ties, of obligations, of convention. They are creatures of routine, as are their animals.

It Was Windy

Baume describes everything about them, about the house, its character, its creaks and groans, its smallest inhabitants, the habits of all those who dwell within its walls, inside its walls, outside its walls in her multiple adjective, poetic prose, that skips across the page to a rhythmic beat.

Discovering a blue rope clothes line in the overgrown grass, they string it up between the tree and the house.

Without knowing it, they had fashioned a wind instrument. There was the flapping of wet fabric, the dull jangle of the wooden pegs, the ping of weathered springs as they came apart, the thud of timber pincers against sod.

The tree was an instrument too. The tips of its branches rapped the plaster skin of the house like drumsticks.

The house was an orchestra – of pipes and whistles, of cymbals and chimes, of missing keys and broken reeds. All January the elements played its planes and lax panes, its slates and flutes. Sometimes its music was a kind of keening , other times, a spontaneous round of applause.

I had the feeling I was reading a prose poem, one that celebrated and played with words, that painted a picture of two people who’d stepped outside of the ordinary life that had become too onerous and sought another kind of ordinary; a slower, quieter more insular version, that fostered simplicity and ignored conformity, that sacrificed the greater community for being at one with the immediate surrounds.

The Hybrid Poet & Spiders

Sara Baume is hands down one of my favourite authors; I love it when a poet rises above that conventional form to create something more akin to storytelling, without losing their adeptness at poetic flow. She is the hybrid poet, one who can take a skill in one area and apply it to another and create something unique, a singular recognisable, assured voice.

In this text she surpasses what was one of my favourite ever literary descriptions of a spider, until now that prize belonged to Martin Booth in his stunning novel The Industry of Souls, for years my favorite novel.

Here is a glimpse at what Sara Baume can do with the common household spider, while subtly acknowledging their insistence in inhabiting various places, in this unconventional life:

wp-1675248154796 First we meet the spider that lives behind the wing mirror of their van, who takes refuge behind the glass.

After every journey, it mended the damage done to its tenuous web by the forcing of rushing air and whipping briars.

And then we meet more, these passages delighted me not just for their linguistic beauty, but due to the familiar feeling of having observed and got to know the habits of certain household spiders, to the point of almost thinking of them as free-ranging pets. When they become something your son wants to show people who visit, who begins to trap insects himself to feed the arachnid.

A different, less industrious spider took up residence in the hollow bars of the steel gate. Another lived in the rubber hollows of the welcome mat. And there were dozens distributed throughout the house –
in alcoves, cupboards, inglenooks,
in open spaces and plain sight.

The largest house spider kept to a cranny beneath the bathroom radiator by day. By night it crawled into the folds of the towels or slid down the gently-slanting sides of the bathtub. In the morning, Bell or Sigh – whoever happened to discover it first – had to dangle a corner of the bathmat down like a rope ladder;
like a lifebuoy.

To the spider, the tub was a snowy fjord, a glacial valley – vast, unmarred, arresting. It knew this was an unsafe place. Still it could not quell a desire to summit the tub’s outer edge. Each time it was blinded by a white glare,
and lost its footing, all eight of its footings,
and skied.

Language skips, pauses, ponders, leaves gaps, creates shapes on the page, carries the reader along on a repetitive yet spellbinding journey that never moves outside a 20 mile radius of their humble abode.

The narrative passes through the months, the seasons, and seven years as they learn about the patterns of their environment and each other, about how to live in harmony with their surroundings, until these humans and their dogs are no longer separate entities, they are as if one.

Highly Recommended.

Sara Baume, Author

Sara Baume’s debut novel, Spill Simmer Falter Wither won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and has been widely translated. Her second novel, A Line Made by Walking, was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize and her 2020 bestselling non-fiction book, handiwork, was shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize. Seven Steeples, was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize and has just been longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize 2023.

Her writing has won the Davy Byrnes Short Story Award, the Hennessy New Irish Writing Award, the Rooney Prize, an Irish Book Award, as well as being nominated for countless others including the Costa and the Dublin Literary Award. She is the recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship and lives in West Cork where she works as a visual artist as well as a writer.

The Statement by Brian Moore (1995)

Political thriller set in France war crimes Much like his final novel The Magician’s Wife (1997) this is another of Brian Moore’s novels, that is more than just a political thriller, it is a work of historical fiction that brings together both his lifetime pursuit for challenging the Catholic Church (here, for harbouring a fugitive war criminal) and his curiosity for elements of a country’s history that often go undetected by the world at large.

The Magician’s Wife came about, after the random spotting of a historical fact in the notes of The Correspondence of Gustave Flaubert and George Sand that mentioned a famous French magician sent on a mission to Algeria by Napoleon II to advance the cause of mal-intended colonial interests, he was to perform to locals to undermine their faith in their marabout (mystical men).

A Chapter in France’s Dark History

Brian Moore 1995 novel to film Tilda Swinton

In The Statement, published in 1995, he writes a story of Pierre Brossard, a French fugitive on the run, pursued by an unknown group of assassins and the gendarmerie, sheltered by various monasteries and clergy. Having previously been condemned to death in absentia by French courts for the murder of 14 Jews during the war, he has been in hiding for over 40 years.

The book felt made for its script conversion, which Moore no doubt had in mind, although its dialogue often reads more like rants against the secretive and hypocritical nature of his religious characters, rather than using the opportunity for his fugitive to be confronted by those who have taken issue with his relative freedom.

While the story itself races through the south of France, from Salon de Provence, through Aix to Nice and Villefranche, (made into a film in 2004 featuring Michael Caine and Tilda Swinton); it is the underlying history that had me ‘stop and start’ reading, looking up the many references he uses or alludes to.

Like the use of the word milice (his protagonist the fictional Brossard, was milice) a reference he does not translate from the French, a word I was not familiar with, but one that lead me down a labyrinth of links related to the military history of France during World War II. At the end of the war, in August 1944 a court martial was held against 98 milice francaise of whom 76 were condemned to death by firing squad. They rest in unmarked graves at Le Grand Bornand.

The First Frenchman Ever Convicted of Crimes Against Humanity

Crime contre l'humanite Brian Moore In real life, Paul Tourvier (1915-1996),a former officer of Vichy France, was a wanted war criminal condemned in absentia for treason and collusion with the Nazis in September 1946 and given the death sentence. Though arrested in 1947 for armed robbery he escaped and evaded capture for 40 years.

In 1966 his death sentence could no longer be upheld due to the statute of limitation and lawyers applied for a pardon. He was given this controversial pardon in 1971 by President Georges Pompidou, but remained in hiding while a new effort was made to charge him with crimes against humanity. Eventually captured, tried and convicted to a life sentence in 1994, he died two years later in prison at the age of 81.

One of the assasins in the novel, referred to only as T is the son of an Algerian Harki, another buried subject that Alice Zeniter researched in her family inspired work of historical fiction l’art de perdre (The Art of Losing).

Brian Moore described his novel The Statement as “a novel with a knife in it” – it made me wonder, who exactly he had the knife out for. Openly referring to that dark, suppressed element of French history and war crimes perpetrated by Vichy France, it pits the French police as pro-Pétain (Chief of State, Vichy France) against The gendarmerie, sympathetic to the Resistance and De Gaulle, adding in hypocritical, anti-Semitic attitudes of the Catholic church in France. But a quick glimpse into his own family history, reveals that it was more than just the Church he took issue with.

Moore’s Personal Vendetta

Living in the south of France, I noticed detail that indicated knowledge and some that was skewed, like the 13100 postcode for Salon de Provence, when it is the postcode for Aix en Provence; it made me go back and look at when it was that Moore spent time in France that gave him both that intimate knowledge and personal interest in the history, to be still writing about it just five years before his death in 1999. So, I digress.

Moore was born in Belfast in August 1921, shortly after the partition of Ireland that created the southern Free State, eventually the Republic of Ireland. His parents and childhood were traditional middle class and his early years relatively protected from the sectarian conflict violence that often erupted around them, despite being a member of the Catholic minority.

Setbacks in adolescence led to his open rejection of the Church and the stifling, provincial, class -bound Belfast atmosphere, including his parents’ religious and ideological affiliations.

Celia Nichols writes in the The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies (CJIS):

Some conservative Irish Catholics, Dr Moore among them, initially supported Hitler’s march across Europe as a protest against the British Empire. Yet Brian Moore, in his independent pursuit of intellectual stimulation joined socialist youth groups, read modern authors such as James Joyce and W.H. Auden, and cultivated interests detached from the predominant Catholic ethos he had been subjected to both at school and at home.

He joined the war effort in 1939 and his knowledge of French had him willingly posted to North Africa and then to posts in Naples, the Cote d’Azur and Paris as the Allied forces advanced. These early travels and the people of many nationalities he would have encountered, contributed to his first hand knowledge, unique perspective, continued curiosity and audacious daring, in terms of the subjects he was willing to explore and confront through his ficiton.

Dedicated to “those who stayed”, “those who left” and “all those who were lost”

Like the young boy and his family, in the excellent film Belfast, Brian Moore became one of those who left, but the effect of his upbringing meant that Belfast was somehow always present, no matter what the subject of his novels.

French Presidential Elections 2022

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It’s an interesting and strange tale to be reading this, as France prepares to elect a new President in the coming months, with first round voting on April 10 and the final vote on April 24, 2022 at a time when politics has become more divisive than ever.

I’m left pondering Moore’s own prosaic statement:

“I don’t think novels do change the world.”

They may not change the world, but they can lead us to look further than storytelling to understand the real life tales they are inspired by, that might serve as a warning.

If the true writer is an outsider, few have perfected this role as subtly as Brian Moore, whose finest work was always marked by his surest personal qualities: intelligence, curiosity and an abiding sense of justice. – extract from an article by Eileen Battersby, Irish Times

March 25, 2022 by Claire 'Word by Word'

The Passenger – Ireland

For Explorers of the World

essays Sara Baume Colum McCann Europa Editions Huginn and Muninn are two ravens from Norse mythology. Sent out by Odin at dawn each day, they return at night to perch on the god’s shoulders, whispering to him whatever knowledge and wisdom they have gathered from every corner of the world. Like Huginn and Muninn The Passenger travels far and wide to bring back the best writing from the countries it visits.

I’ve been reading this over the past week and only meant to read a couple more essays today, but they were so interesting, I kept going and finished it.

Featuring long form essays, investigative journalism, literary reportage and visual narratives, it takes readers beyond the familiar stereotypes to portray a country’s shifting culture and identity, its public debates, the sensibilities of its people, its burning issues, its pleasures and its pain. It was published in the UK by Europa Editions on March 17.

Some Numbers About Ireland

Essays About Ireland and the Irish Population (the island of Ireland) : 6.9 million (the highest since 1851)

Population (the Republic of Ireland) : 5.01 million

People Who Speak Irish at Home : 83,000

People Who Speak Polish at Home : 120,000

Castles or castle ruins : 30,000

Eurovision Song contest wins : 7 (more than any other country)

Nobel Prizes in Literature : 4

W.B. Yeats (1923),

George Bernard Shaw (1925)

Samuel Beckett (1969)

Seamus Heaney (1995)

11 Essays

The Mass is Ended by Catherine Dunne and Caelainn Hogan

A dual narrative essay written by two women writers from different generations, talking about growing up in Ireland as a woman, how it has begun to transform from an insular, conservative society under the repressive influence of the Catholic Church and how it continued to negatively impact women’s lives long after other countries began addressing such issues. The women discuss the decline of the Church’s influence, the dismantling of a system designed to oppress women and the culture of silence.

Bogland by William Atkins

A fascinating and insightful article about the natural phenomena of the midland area of Ireland, covered in peatlands, referred to locally as bogs. Initially seen as undesirable and an embarrassment, they then became a source of revenue, economic growth and jobs, not to mention local fuel. Environmentally controversial like many fuel extraction processes, the industry is now in decline and being phased out. The bogs have been found to contain human remains from the Iron Age dating back to between 470 BC.

An Ocean of Wisdom by Manchan Magnan

Photo by Kelly L on Pexels.com

Fascinated by the Irish language and its connection to fishing and the sea, we learn how the decline of a small local fishing industry heralded the decline and disappearance of much of the language. Magnan travelled to the three areas of Gaeltachtai (Irish speaking) to discover locals words and phrases that expressed aspects of the sea, weather and coastal life, linguistic nuances that described a way of life that is disappearing (due to the impact of foreign fishing trawlers) and with it, a form of expression and being.

Like other old tongues, the Irish language has unique ways of expressing things – one example of which is that Irish regards the unseen world as being just as real as the seen, and this is evident in many ofthe phrases, metaphors and colloquial expressions that make up daily speech. So the word ceantar, for instance, means place, region or locality, while alltar is its opposite, the other realm, the netherworld. They exist simultaneously in all places at all times.

Our physical bodies occupy the ceantar, but our minds can easily slip into the alltar. Only a thin veil separates the two realms, and there were always those who could pass from one to the other, as is demonstrated by the word púicín, which refers to a supernatural covering that allows otherworldly beings to appear unseen in this reality.

The efforts to revive and reconnect to the language and the growing awareness of the importance language is to maintaining connection to a culture is encouraging. Losing language is to lose meaning and connection, reclaiming it might well contribute to the country’s healing process.

Talismans by Sara Baume

Sara Baume is know for her two fiction novels, a third Seven Steeples due out in Apr ’22, however if you’ve read her excellent work of nonfiction Handiwork, you’ll know she is a visual artist and loves crafting things, using her hands, sculpting or making things from different materials and they always have a theme.

creative nonfiction bird migration songbirds In Handiwork, she was sculpting birds, but here she writes about the Irish cottage, its evolution and the rise of the Irish villas that were much despised for a period of time. As she spends months creating objects that represent small scale versions of these houses, she reflects on the way Ireland’s built environment has changed.

The idea was to draw a contrast between the grandiosity of the monster mansions and my choice of coarse, everyday materials – the intention being to invent an updated and deeply cynical souvenir.

She visits a reconstructed Irish cottage with Marion McGarry, author of The Irish Cottage: History, Culture and Design (2017), who recounts :

‘the fire was both physically and socially situated in the centre of the house’. Whereas European families routinely gathered around the kitchen table, the Irish would push all of their furniture back against the walls to surround the light and heat of the hearth.

Everything that Falls Must Also Rise – by Colum McCann

The New York based Irish writer reflects on the choice he and many others made to emigrate, what it’s like to return, to become an outsider and be rooted elsewhere, yet still refer to it as home. Full of nostalgia, this one almost feels out of place in the collection, and the enlarged font size stands out almost as a clue to the demographic its likely to appeal to.

At The Edge of Two Unions: Northern Ireland’s Causeway Coast by Mark Devenport

The BBC’s former political editor in Northern Ireland writes about a region hanging in the balance between two Unions, the UK and the EU, torn between fear and opportunity and the distinct feeling of having been abandoned. A century of Northern Ireland, how attitudes and loyalties are evolving and changing with the generations and neighbouring affiliations.

Suicides of the Ceasefire Babies (originally published in 2016) by Lyra McKee

Photo by Luke Webb on Pexels.com

An essay written by the journalist Lyra McKee, who investigated the troubling fact that since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, more people in Northern Ireland have committed suicide than were killed during the 30 year conflict.

This was a fascinating read, because it ties in with Kerri Ní Dochartaigh’s Thin Places and when I began to read Lyra’s essay and her questions, I could tell what was coming, because if you’ve read Thin Places and imagined how many other young people have been exposed to what she had been (including being told “you lot had it much easier than our generation” by their parents) and the subsequent suppression of their feelings/emotions, it’s not surprising that there is a significant proportion of the population, particularly in the towns of Belfast and Derry that have suffered the delayed effects of PTSD, without even knowing it.

Her investigation looks at the cause, uncovers existing research and also learns about how trauma survivors pass their behaviours and certain genes (when parental trauma has been experienced prior to conception) to children.

Intergenerational transmission of trauma is not just a sociological or psychological problem, but also a biological one.

Sadly, Lyra McKee was murdered in 2019.

What I Learned On My Trip to Westeros by Mark O’Connell

I guess there had to be the one that references The Game of Thrones, little more than a guided tour of the locations, an attempt to make a connection between the fantasy of the land imagined by George R.R. Martin (inspired by 15th century civil wars) and the more recent history and reality of a divided land.

Unfortunately, the lens through which he views things around him obscures the actual landscape and barely disguises his disdain for the local guides, while going off on a tangent about a novel relating to the philosophical and aesthetic preoccupations of the Argentinian author Borges.

Citizens’ Assemblies: Experiments in Democracy by Ursula Barry

An excellent and insightful look into the establishment of Citizens’ Assemblies, an invention and intervention by common people to facilitate decision making on important issues that have gone unresolved by politicians for far too long.

This was brilliant, I wasn’t aware that it was these assemblies that had been behind some of the most significant changes and reforms in Ireland’s constitution, and a model that has and is being used elsewhere in Europe, when the population begins to protest and govt wants to listen but is unable to act, here is another way that is even more democratic perhaps, than elected officials, who get tied up with multiple agendas and lose sight of the common citizen, especially those adversely affected by outdated policies and inhumane practices.

The final two essays were about one man’s interest in Irish music (from a perspective of a lifetime living in England) and rugby, neither of which particularly interested me enough to write about here!

Overall, an excellent exploration of the life and times of modern Ireland. Beautifully illustrated and highly recommended.

March 21, 2022 by Claire 'Word by Word'

Thin Places by Kerri ní Dochartaigh

Thin Places is something of an enigma, when I bought it, I thought it was in the nature writing genre, the inside cover calls it a mix of memoir, history and nature writing – such a simplistic description of the reading experience, which for me was something else.

Heaven and earth, the Celtic saying goes, are only three feet apart, but in thin places that distance is even shorter. They are places that make us feel something larger than ourselves, as though we are held in a place between worlds, beyond experience.

This book is a kind of cathartic experience of being inside the experience of someone who has experienced trauma, who has yet to awaken from its implications, or be conscious of its effect – but who by the end will by necessity awaken to it, because it can no longer be contained inside the mind, the body and for the good of the soul, it must be expressed, broken down, if there is to be any change of coming out the other side.

Even as a child, I could see no way of staying in my hometown. The edges of the broken and breaking city never quite held themselves in place, and my own family life mirrored those fractures.

So the first part of the book I can only describe as “being in the fog”. We know Kerri ní Dochartaigh was born in Derry on the border of the North and South of Ireland, at the height of the troubles, that her parents were of mixed heritage, a Protestant father and Catholic mother; the family existed in the oftentime dangerous in-between, safe in neither space or only temporarily, always moving, never truly belonging.

We have a somewhat difficult relationship with the word ‘tradition’ in Ireland, particularly in the North. The way that religion has latched itself onto the politics of this land has left many people with no desire to look at the imagery of their ancestors; the story of their past. We have lost, broken, murdered, burned, stolen, hidden and undone – all in the false name of tradition. Lives, places and stories have been ripped out by their roots because ‘that’s how it has always been’. I wonder, I wonder so very much these days, what wealth of imagery and meaning was lost when we became so focused on our differences here, that we buried the things that had once tied us together, the things that might still know a way through, for us all.

Though we are told this, the uninitiated reader doesn’t really understand what that means, how it actually manifests on the human level, on a day to day basis – until she arrives at the point where she realises, she needs to confront the reality of the things that happened – because she is losing it – and finding it harder and harder to function in the bubble of denial that allows her to go about her day, to work, to live.

The past, present and future all seemed to blend into one, and every single part of the story held sorrow that I couldn’t get rid of, no matter how deeply I try to bury it. So many different things – situations, times of year, people – made the bad things rise up from inside to bite me again. Triggers, I know that now. It left me feeling scared, hollowed out and with no control over any of it, not really knowing how to make it – any of it – stop.

Photo by Ducky on Pexels.com

Only after finishing Part 1 Blood and Bone did I comprehend what I was reading, a woman’s life from childhood up to the age of 28 striving to not give in to the effects of trauma, in the opening chapters, she alludes to those things, though is unable to write directly about them, until realising the nightmares will never stop if she doesn’t, the numbing eventually worse than the pain.

And so she begins to share the events. And it’s tough to read, to absorb as we imagine the magnitude of the effect these events must have had on a child, on an adolescent, a young adult. But what courage, to make that decision, to visit that dark place, to express those thoughts, recount those events, relive the disappointments, feel again the sense of abandonment, to trust that writing about it might bring one towards healing.

While there are those moments of how nature and the many metaphors and symbolism of it kept her sane, this is more about the nature of mind and the necessity of finding and/or making meaning in navigating the troubles of life, in order to overcome past hurts, reconcile traumatic events and find a way to live again, to believe in hope, to elevate one’s self-worth and be able to function in a relationship.

thin places between worlds trauma spiritual healing

Photo by Leigh Heasley on Pexels.com

It is a tough and unrelenting read, that at times I needed to take a break from, but it is one that we as readers are privileged to gain insight from, because Kerri ni Dochartaigh could very easily not be here, and yet she is – and I like to believe that in part that is because the sharing of her experience and path to healing are an important part of her soul’s purpose in this life.

This extraordinary book is part of her life’s work, she has found a way to articulate to the many, the terrible destructive effect of divisiveness , prejudice and intolerance on young people, the effect of not feeling safe during childhood and adolescence and the difficulty of becoming something other than what you knew growing up – of learning to trust, to love, of connecting to the natural environment, learning a near lost language that connects the Irish to their environment and dwelling in just being.

Naming things, in the language that should always have been offered to you, is a way to sculpt loss. A way to protect that which we still have.

Hard going at times, but extraordinary, a beating, bleeding heart, ripped open to heal.

Kerri ní Dochartaigh, Author

Born in 1983, in Derry-Londonderry at the border between the North and South of Ireland. She read English Literature and Classical Civilisation at Trinity College Dublin and trained as a Waldorf teacher in Edinburgh. She taught in Edinburgh and Bristol, before returning to Ireland in her early thirties.

She writes about nature, literature and place for the Irish Times, Dublin Review of Books, Caught by the River and others. She has also written for the Guardian, BBC, Winter Papers. Thin Places was highly commended by the Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing 2021.

March 15, 2022 by Claire 'Word by Word'

The China Factory by Mary Costello

It’s week three of Reading Ireland Month and today I’m sharing thoughts on a book of short stories by Irish author Mary Costello, The China Factory.

Threads of Inspiration

Irish Literature Reading Ireland Month I’ve heard many say good things about her debut novel Academy Street and when her most recent novel The River Capture was published, a self-confessed homage to James Joyce’s Ulysses, I decided I would start at the beginning with Costello’s short stories.

I will read The River Capture later, as April is the One Dublin, One Book initiative and their chosen read for 2022 is Nora by Nuala O’Connor another book with a James Joyce connection. It is a bold reimagining of the life of James Joyce’s wife and muse, Nora, the model for his character Molly Bloom in Ulysses.

The Dublin City Libraries initiative encourages people to read a book connected with the capital city during the month of April every year.

Capturing a Voice

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The 12 stories that make up The China Factory create a strong sense of authorial voice. Highly observant, sensitive characters, steeped in melancholy. They are practiced at holding back, trying not to make a ripple in the external world, until unforseen events pitch them into interactions, all the while controlling that emotional seepage.

In the opening story, The China Factory, a young woman works a summer job in a china factory, catching a ride with a quiet man named Gus, who she is distantly related to. She works at the sponger’s station, wiping off lines the moulds leave on clay cups.

I smiled when I passed the other girls those first days, and longed to speak, but feared that words would betray the yearning for friendship that I felt inside.

For a while she becomes closer to the girls, listening to their gossip, they quiz her about Gus, the freak, sharing an overheard story of his childhood that disturbs her. When a wayward man appears with a gun, Gus will surprise them all, and years later the impact of that summer job, his actions and her guilt will continue to haunt her.

dreamy woman with crossed legs sitting near window

Photo by L.SummerPexels.com

In Things I See a woman lies in bed, hyper aware of her husbands movements downstairs, she relays scenes in her mind of being close to him, but even in her imagination she holds back. She fears not growing old, but of growing different.

There is something severe and imperious in Don’s bearing that makes me resist.

She works full time and her husband cares for their six year old child. Her sister Lucy who is visiting, seems more at ease in the family than she does. The things she sees, hears, picks up on, imagines, occupy her mind, creating a distance, a corner from which she has entrapped herself. A witness. Stifled. Knowing she will not change anything, though her indecision will imprint itself on her face and in her demeanour.

And I think this is how things are, and this is how they will remain, and with every new night and every new wind I know that am cornered too, and I will remain, because I can not unlove him.

Drudgery, Dignity and Denial

The stories examine aspects of everyday life and highlight the hidden selves, the thoughts beneath the actions, the things that people hide from each other, from themselves, the cover stories and meaningless conversations that patch over the cracks that might reveal the reality.

In The Patio Man, a gardener knows nothing about his employer, a young frail woman observes him from the window, she struggles to articulate what she requires from him, until the moment she must ask him to drive her to the hospital. Still nothing is ever said, just small talk that takes the mind elsewhere, far from the catastrophic event occurring in the present.

The collection opens with an epigram from Rilke’s poem Autumn:

And night by night, down into solitude,

the heavy earth falls far from every star.

We are all falling. This hand’s falling too –

all have this falling-sickness none withstands.

which sets the tone and theme of falling – into and out of love, of relationships, to one’s death, in and out of the kaleidoscope of emotions, whether expressed or suppressed, no one is immune to the falling-sickness.

While the stories capture that voice particular to the author, that melancholy can wear on the reader, repeated time and again as it does, manifesting in the many losses and unfortunate events each story portrays, the quiet outer acceptance of discordant inner turmoil.

That said, I am looking forward to engaging with a longer story, hoping for the chance of redemption a novel might bring.

Mary Costello, Author

Mary Costello is an Irish short story writer and novelist from Galway now living in Dublin.

Her collection of short stories, The China Factory ( 2012), was nominated for the Guardian First Book Award.

Her second book and first novel, Academy Street, was shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award, the Costa First Novel Prize and the EU Prize for Literature in 2014. The novel went on to win the Irish Novel of the Year Award as well as the Irish Book of the Year. Her second novel The River Capture was published in 2019.

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