Claire Kilroy

Soldier Sailor is on the shortlist for the Irish Book Awards 2023.

Cathy at 746 Books praised this one, as her pick for Novel of the Year, saying it deserved the award attention, so I decided to read it to find out what that was about.

The Clash of Fierce Love versus Stolen Identity

Irish Book Awards 2023 motherhood literary fiction

So, after an eleven year gap since the publication of her last book, following the birth of her son, Claire Kilroy has overcome her writer’s block and “angry few years”, to produce a piercing, visceral account by the unnamed narrator Soldier ravaged by new motherhood, to the child, Sailor.

Here is how the author describes her book:

Soldier Sailor is a mother talking to her sleeping child explaining what was going on during those years he was too young to understand or remember the events around him. She tells him of her love, but also of how difficult, how isolating she found it when motherhood ended her old life. Nothing much happens; one of the main characters, Sailor, has no dialogue. The whole experience is a non-event from the outside, but when you are that soldier pushing the pram, my, what a psychodrama it is.

The novel as the image depicts, zooms right in to the responsibility, the bond and the practice of being mother to a small child, to how it changes EVERYTHING. From the entering into a relationship like no other that exists and the loss of what came before it; to the very different support that a mother might need, and the unlikely place(s) she might find it.

A Mother’s Instinct to Kill

It is not a reflection, it is an act, you will read it and live it, or relive aspects of it, if you have already been there.

Do you know what I would I do for you? I hope not. What would I not do, is the question. The universe careens around us and I shield your sleeping body with my arms, ready to proclaim to the heavens that I would kill for you: that I would kill others for you, that I would kill myself. I would even kill my husband if it came down to it. I swear every woman in my position feels the same. We all go bustling about, pushing shopping trolleys or whatever, acting like love of this voltage is normal; domestic, even.That we know how to handle it. But I don’t.

Using the second person “you” addressed as a monologue to her baby son, the narrative swings between the emotional peaks of a tireless love, to violent frustration and resentment; from the misleading two second Instagram snaps sent to the elsewhere husband, to her thirty second screaming telephone rages, with only the reader, witness to and understanding the riding crescendo of events that lead from one of those events to the next. A bewildered husband, observing the peaks, oblivious.

Your sleeve is in your dinner, my husband remarked. He wasn’t there but he didn’t have to be there. He was always there when things were going wrong. Yet never there to help. The luxury, the sheer luxury of sending a last-minute message saying you wouldn’t be home that evening. It would be a decade – more – before I could do the same. What does he eat? he had texted me the one time he was left in charge?

Sons and Fathers Take Note

To read this account, especially because of the culture within which it stems from, one that for many years locked up its women who expressed too loudly their discontent, or behaved in ways considered improper, is to understand a little of what was labelled hysteria – one of the natural consequences of needs not being met. Forget the narrative arc, read this and you plunge into the subject, you become it, you feel it, you remember bits of it. The son is warned, made to understand, his future depends on it.

I was firmly in my wrong mind and liable to do anything, so off I went, down the stairs, out the door, up the drive, through the gate, along the road, overcome by a wildness that I needed to convert to movement or else risk doing something stupid, and by stupid I mean destructive because words have many meanings, Sailor, and you must deploy them with care because they can inflict real hurt.

The mother like her infant child, is reborn yet will only realise she has inhabited this new being ‘the mother who birthed‘ when it is too late, when this tiny creature she loves so fiercely and will protect with her life, claims her, and in her most challenging moments, she like him, will feel the desire to scream, to run, to escape or somehow figure out, how to make ‘the other’ understand.

What struck me as the starkest contradiction of all was that, having navigated this much of life – the volatility of youth, of love and loss, the agony and the ecstasy – the closest I had come to losing my mind was during the period known as settling down.

Friendship for Hope and Healing

motherhood Soldier Sailor Claire Kilroy — Photo by Oleksandr P on Pexels.com

This text will not speak of the quiet moments, it is the intersection of all the moments lived, of the brutal awakening that is ‘becoming a mother’ and the warning to ‘the other’ that did not give birth, who is part of the journey, to prepare for this change and get ready to adapt, to support, to listen, to learn to be ‘the friend’ she is going to need.

One day she encounters an old friend, and these follow up meets mark a turning point, to being seen again, to being understood, and something dangerous shifts, quiets. Small gestures, moments of listening, the beginning of a form of solidarity.

We were better together my friend and I. Better parents. I was anyway. I was a better mother to you when I was around my friend. But a worse wife.

We arrive at the end – where she imagines moments years down the road ahead – with a kind of relief, knowing that with age and stage, the distance between those peaks will lessen, the relationships will either adapt or crumble, that true friendships will witness and endure it all.

An utterly compelling read that you won’t want to put down.

Claire Kilroy, Author

Claire Kilroy is the author of five novels including Soldier Sailor, All Summer, Tenderwire, and The Devil I Know. She was awarded the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in 2004 and has been shortlisted for many other prizes, including the Irish Novel of the Year and the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award.

She studied at Trinity College and lives in Dublin.

What do you hope readers will take away from your narrative?

It is so easy to dismiss a mother and her work, and a father and his – one of the main characters is a stay-at-home dad. I had no idea what minding an infant involved and had regarded it as easy, unchallenging (I am mortified to admit that), so I hope I have revealed how demanding it is, but also how rewarding, never mind how important. I hope more fathers will get involved in raising children because it changes you, it remakes you, you become more compassionate. I don’t think Trump and Putin would be the awful tyrants they are had they cared for, well, anyone. It doesn’t have to be a child, just any person or creature who needs care.