Book Reviews (Feb 2025)
Playing catchup here - mostly Irish fiction from the last year or two.
Catherine Dunne - A Good Enough Mother
"There is nothing that is ever made better by silence… nothing. Especially in this country." Acclaimed writer Catherine Dunne explores motherhood and secrecy in this intricately-woven tale, a patchwork quilt of a book that moves from the present day to various points in the past and expects you to keep up (or at least trust that the connections will become clear, which you will; we’re in good hands here). Mothers who don’t want to be mothers, mothers who had their children taken away from them (as you might imagine, the Irish state - and society - does not come off well here), mothers who are struggling with their own secrets and stigmas and the fact that no matter what you do, you’re never ‘good enough’.
I love the title, because it also echoes what the psychologist and paediatrician Donald Winnicott argued children need, something still used in parenting guides today: not a perfect mother, a good enough mother (or good enough parent, in our mildly-more-enlightened times). This novel covers a lot, but handles it lightly; it’s emotional but not sentimental. (I had the pleasure of interviewing Dunne for a literary festival last year, and I know ‘I had the pleasure of…’ is a real LinkedIn phrase, along with ‘I was honoured…’ about the most minor of things, but it really was a pleasing thing to get to hear more about this book, and the writing process, and the sensitive handling of difficult topics.)
*
Jenny Colgan - Studies
Book 4 in the ‘School by the Sea’ series, a kind of grown-up Malory Towers (we get the drama of the teachers and the students!), looks at class and opportunity alongside the romance and family stuff. I am fond of this series but this one felt a little tacked-on, with certain things that had seemed to be sorted being newly-unsorted… worth reading for the sense of closure, though.
*
Fiona McPhillips - When We Were Silent
Lou Manson is an English Literature lecturer these days, discussing unreliable narrators and ideas of heroism with her Trinity undergrads. She is respectable and settled; she looks out for her anxious teenage daughter, Katie, and in recent years she has let herself be loved by Alex, now her wife, despite an upbringing that was more than a little shaky.
But it's her past that's about to spill out over everything she's worked so hard for now - an old friend gets in touch about a new court case relating to abuse at the swimming club attached to the school she once attended, a scholarship girl bristling in a world of privilege. It wouldn't be the first time Lou went to court. It wouldn't be the first time she had something to say about a swim coach.
And yet it's even more complicated and tangled - as we move back to the 1980s, and a very different Ireland, we learn that Lou's attendance at the posh school had an agenda from the beginning…
This debut novel from journalist and non-fiction writer Fiona McPhillips is polished and gripping. It reminded me a little of The Favourite by Rosemary Hennigan, though the setting’s completely different; it features that same desire to ‘catch out’ a known abuser and then realising you’re in over your head with it, that same look at the structures that let powerful men get away with things over and over again, rather than imagining any incident is a once-off.
*
Michael Magee - Close To Home
Magee, a writer from Northern Ireland or "the North" depending on your point-of-view (it comes up) has been what we might call "on the scene" literary-wise for a good while (stories published in The Stinging Fly, a PhD from Queens, an editor role at The Tangerine) if you are the sort of person who pays attention to such things (I think I mean… a writer?). "Mainstream" wise, his debut novel, Close To Home, has been recognised by various fancy prizes as the sort of work worth paying attention to.
It's very, very good, but it's also good in that way beyond the initial fizz and excitement that you sometimes get with debuts - it's solid, is what I think I mean.
Set in 2013, the Belfast tale begins with young Sean punching a middle-class arsey type at a house party, and having to face the consequences. At 22, he's a little adrift - he's been away for uni but returned to his home city, where he's falling back into old patterns, because the career trajectories for arts degrees still depend on a certain level of who-you-know or existing privilege (being able to take up unpaid internships, for example). This aspect of the novel fascinated me, in part because a lot of my Northern Irish reading involves YA fiction - recently blessedly freed of the need to be a Troubles-era problem novel every time - in which getting to university is the "way out", the fix, the solution. This is the: okay, yeah, but what next?
At the same time, I am not entirely persuaded of Sean's backslide so soon after his degree, particularly the gap he feels between himself and the Queens students he ends up hanging around with. For him to feel as though the language of academia is nonsense, or tiresomely distant, fair enough - but he has just been through three years of writing essays, of being in that world. He doesn't grasp for points made in past tutorials or the kind of stuff that'd get you a first or at least a solid 2:1 in these discussions; he seems completely adrift (and yet he isn't! We know he is a reader, a thoughtful one). I would have loved more of this, because the conflict here is interesting, and thought-provoking, but it does feel as though the three years of his undergraduate degree don't matter (and maybe they don't, but in that case the how they don't, how it all feels pointless or for others-with-money/access, would have been brilliant).
(I am, I know, a tad obsessed with wanting more on the specifics of the educational experiences of fictional characters.)
But this is not a novel about academia so much as it is about class, the dark dirty secret beneath the sectarian troubles. We don’t get anything as crass or unskilful as Sean lecturing us on this point, but there is a moment (and I was reminded of how Emma Donoghue in Room cannot resist having the experts have their say for a couple of lines) where there's a Venn Diagram between The Troubles and Poor Communities and it's revealing. The constant scrabbling, the exhaustion of it, and the vulnerability of it. It's dramatised rather than told and you're just there, with them, with Sean, frustrated and pissed-off and desperate and caught between ethics and survival. (In our late-capitalist system with its treacherous precarity, it is immensely relevant.)
It's also - god, I don’t know what me, a neurotic lady, saying "it's good on masculinity!" might mean or accomplish, but it feels attentive to the ways in which men care for one another, or let one another down, or sometimes both; Sean has important relationships with women (his mother and an old schoolfriend) but there are also moments with his mates, with his older, hurting brother, with the lads he encounters while doing his community service. And there's a tangle over his estranged father - who he loves but is also an abuser (though not of him) - and the life he might have had. It does a great job at exploring fondness without getting sentimental over it - always a fine line.
*
Susannah Dickey - Common Decency
As with Magee, Dickey feels an important and recognised figure in Irish literature although she is, astonishingly, still relatively early in her career; this is her second novel alongside much-acclaimed poetry and (they're all at it) a PhD from Queens.
This feels more overtly-PhD-ish than Magee (I was reminded a little of Rosalind Brown's Practice), with the analysis woven into the narrative more than is always plausible for the characters (in a maybe-we-need-this-to-be-more-omniscient way), even though I adored it. Comparisons to Sally Rooney are absolutely overdone when it comes to Irish women writers under the age of forty, I am aware, and are rarely fair to anyone involved, but that way of being seemingly-effortlessly-brilliant in musings, attentive to how life is lived and how structural inequalities operate, while also having romantic dilemmas, is also a feature of Dickey’s writing. Though - spoiler spoiler spoiler - the happy endings are more elusive.
Now onto the characters, for they are entrancing: 20something women in different kinds of fucked-up-ness (oh, be still my heart). Lily and Siobhan live in the same block of flats and are nodding acquaintances (though a mild case of stalking is about to kick off). Lily works in a hospital gift shop part-time and does some volunteering nearby to keep herself busy; she’s haunted by the recent loss of her brilliant, clever, quirky mother. Siobhan is a teacher, put-together enough to have gotten herself a permanent position already, but also hopelessly devoted to her troublesome married boyfriend, which brings with it all the usual drama (and yet is somehow still so addictive and compelling).
Their lives intertwine in subtle ways, with supporting characters in one storyline popping up in the background of the other, but also more overtly, like when Lily wrangles her way into their neighbour’s flat and nabs Siobhan’s spare key. It’s unsettling, though also convincingly done; it’s quieter than psychological-thriller-level obsession and we’re here for the writing as much as the plot. The Belfast setting may feel incidental, at first, particularly if one has just finished an extremely State Of Northern Ireland novel, but it - and the lingering trauma of the Troubles - very much shapes the book and the characters, without it necessarily being the main point.
I really enjoyed this.
*
Sean Hewitt - Open, Heaven
I found myself a little underwhelmed by this, which is similar to what I said after reading Hewitt’s memoir, All Down Darkness Wide, and I do not think it is a fault of the writing so much as it is the hype - this debut novel from the acclaimed writer arrives at the end of April, but has already been praised by many writers I admire and adore, sometimes with a kind of effusiveness that makes me suspicious of the entire blurbing process (as one should be, probably, and about which much has been said recently).
This is a Very Good novel about the kind of queer coming-of-age first-intense-love experience that I absolutely adore reading about - I wanted to love this beyond reason, is what I’m saying - but it is not the Best Thing Ever, not even in this category.
Part of that is maybe that there’s intense competition, in books of this kind - you’re up against titles like Philippe Besson’s Lie With Me, or Andre Aciman’s Call Me By Your Name, or the poetry of Andrew McMillan, and that’s setting the bar high.
And part of it, I’m sure, is that the nature-y Hopkins-y stuff that I know is a thing for Hewitt just doesn’t do it for me, and the fault is mine, then, because I knew that going in. But it does do it for plenty of readers, so it is still (I hope) helpful to note my own experience here; if bookish thoughts are done well, the bits we weren't mad about, if articulated semi-decently, will be the reason another reader makes something the book of their heart.
*
Cathy Sweeney - Breakdown
I adored Cathy Sweeney’s short story collection, Modern Times, and was not quite sure what to expect from her first novel, which leans more on the realistic side of things rather than the dark quirky brilliance of the shorter pieces. But I am a sucker for ‘mother walks out on her life’ stories (it is wise, I think, that I do not have children of my own) - Anne Tyler’s Ladder Of Years and Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room in particular are seared into my brain.
In this taut novel, an ‘ordinary’ (nicely middle-class) woman walks out on her life and we move between the specifics of her initial journey and what her life is like now, months later - quieter and more connected to nature and less caught up in the busyness and insanity of modern life. Throughout, there is a focus on signs and instructions - what we’re being told to do, in many cases - adding up to a quiet prodding about just how ‘broken down’ society may already be. Liked this a lot.
Elsewhere:
reviewed for the Irish Times in November: Sabaa Tahir, Heir; Olivia Levez, Silver; Blessing Musariri, When It’s Your Turn For Midnight; Adiba Jaigirdar, Rani Choudhury Must Die; Marisha Pessl, Darkly.
reviewed for the Irish Times in December: Susan Cahill, The World Between The Rain; Bill Wood, Let’s Split Up; Scarlett Dunmore, How To Survive A Horror Movie; Rosie Talbot and Sarah Maxwell, Phantom Hearts; Bex Hogan, Nettle.
reviewed for Children’s Books Ireland/Inis: Jan Van Der Veken, Space: From Sputnik to the International Space Station; Garth Nix, We Do Not Welcome Our Ten-Year-Old Overlord.
reviewed for the Irish Times in January: Jenny Downham and Louis Hill, Let the Light In; Gayle Forman, After Life; William Hussey, The Boy I Love; CG Drews, Don’t Let The Forest In; Peter Lantos and Victoria Stebleva, The Boy Who Didn’t Want To Die.