Authors M to R

Normal People by sally rooney

‘He would have betrayed any confidence, any kindness, for the promise of social acceptance’

In Carricklea, Co. Sligo, Marianne and Connell are on opposite sides of a socio-economic chasm. Publicly, this chasm keeps them separate but privately they blossom in the intimate glow of their friendship. At school Connell is well liked and his reputation is cemented among his peers; whereas Marianne remains detached from groups, an unhappy Proust reading pariah in uncomfortable terrain . Sally Rooney shows extraordinary insight and understanding into the limitations of social development in school. Invisible societal rules ensure that social acceptance is only possible for those who are willing to pursue it and prioritise it; this is what Connell did. The novel follows the development of Marianne and Connell over four years as they step out of the familiarity of school and into the polished world of Trinity College. A role reversal takes place and Marianne sheds the skin of Carricklea to emerge as a social powerhouse. Connell sags under the weight of the unfamiliar and the economic difference widens, a gaping hole between them.

In school, we are superficial and selfish. We are too young to be anything else. We collect relationships and friendships like coloured socks, discarding them when they become worn and the lustre of novelty has worn off. The heaving classrooms leave no room for individuality so we conform and we leave behind those who do not. Sally Rooney understands this about us; she reshapes all of us at age seventeen and forces us to walk the long school halls again. Marianne possesses a rare inner strength which allows her to appear wise beyond her years. This wisdom can take the guise of coldness and it is only much later in the novel that we see this coldness stems from a home built on fear and violence. Connell is publicly distant toward Marianne, not brave enough to sacrifice social acceptance for the blurred lines of a friendship. Yet something spectacular emerges from these blurred lines; a raw honesty develops between both characters, a safe place of truth, sexual exploration and acceptance.

At this point in the novel, the pages become littered with Trinity students, cloaked in money and prospects. With age comes less of a need for peer acceptance for Connell but an ever growing awareness of the economic differences between them and him. Marianne flourishes away from home with a deep reluctance to return, whereas Connell craves the intimacy of the Sligo surrounds and their relationship flounders and reignites repeatedly. We owe it to ourselves to read this book. We used others or allowed them to use us. We prioritised reputations over friendships. We persevered in school because we knew that what awaited us at home was far worse. The cruelty Rooney depicts, in hindsight, is a subtle undercurrent in the entire novel. Rooney speaks effortlessly for each and every one of us and in doing so, crafts a multilayered character who steps from the past into the future, damaged but beautiful.

©Dymphna Nugent

by royal appointment by a.o’connor

In 1861, Irish actress and vivacious music hall singer Nellie Cliffden embarked on an affair with nineteen year old Bertie, Prince of Wales. This affair nearly tore the monarchy apart, at a time when Irish support for the Crown was at its weakest following the famine. Inspired by true events, A.’O Connor shapes both characters until their combined hopes and dreams of a united life is tangible and defined.

The Irish famine endured from 1845 until 1849 and the total deaths were estimated to be in the region of one million. Irish people died, ravaged by starvation; many more Irish emigrated, clutching at a chance of a better life.Public support was dangerously low for the English Crown following the famine. Many Irish felt as though Queen Victoria and her husband Albert had seen the suffering of the Irish people as inconvenient and trivial. Their son Bertie did not share their leadership strength in England and therefore, public support was quite low for him also. A training visit to the Curragh Camp in Kildare was deemed to be a good leadership exercise for the Prince and he left England for the freedom, as he saw it, of Ireland. A.O’Connor uses this visit as an extraordinary opportunity to highlight the ignorance of the monarchy towards the sufferings of Ireland. The Prince remarks upon the greatly reduced population, not realising that the numbers have been decimated through death and emigration. This ignorance is echoed during the visit of Queen Victoria and her husband to Killarney, where she noticed the ravaged appearances of the women and the ill mannered failure of the majority of the populace to come out to support her visit. A.O’Connor makes no attempt to hide his disdain at the reality of this being the reaction of the monarchy towards famine Ireland.

A famine orphan, Dublin born Nellie Cliffden has earned a name on stage for her daring, flirtatious manner of speaking to the audience and the haunting singing voice which contrasts with that persona. The memory of an empty stomach and the perpetual fear of returning to famine Ireland fuels her decision to spend the night with wealthy men in exchange for money, while maintaining her infamous stage presence. Bertie, Prince of Wales needs a lover, someone to see him as someone other than royalty and to embrace his strengths; Nellie needs money and so what seems initially to be a mutually beneficial tryst becomes two people swimming against the grain of tradition, lost in a love tainted by dishonour and social complexities.

Nellie returns to England with Bertie, leaving behind a cheap reputation and no family ties. Both believe that in England, Nellie can become Bertie’s wife and eventually rule England alongside him. A.O’Connor breathes humanity into the story of Bertie and Nellie, on one hand we are reminded of the preventable atrocities of the famine, one the other hand we are shown two people in love, rendered helpless by the rules of birthright. A.O’Connor attempts to bridge the chasm between England and Ireland by reminding us that behind each monarch is a face and a desire to do more than their role allowed, unexpectedly leaving us livid with a sense of injustice at the end.

The characters were well fleshed out and the plot was well researched with a captivating embellishment on historical facts. I felt that the ending was written for the readers, as opposed to being as savage as it could have been but this was a well presented and engrossing read, with a unique viewpoint on the aftermath of the famine in Ireland.

©Dymphna Nugent

notes to self by emilie pine

‘I write this now to reclaim those parts of me that for so long I so thoroughly denied’

It is in our nature to gloss over the less than perfect elements of our lives. Even if our childhoods were difficult at times, we allow time to soften the sharper edges until we are almost certain we imagined some of the pain. In the first of Emilie Pine’s six essays Notes on Intemperance, she cannot gloss over those less than perfect elements, nor pretend that searing pain has not followed her from childhood into adulthood. Her father is hospitalised in remote Corfu, covered in faeces and drowning in blood. A lifetime of alcoholism and solitary living has left his body bruised, uncared for and most certainly dying. The roles are reversed and child must take care of parent, even while he refuses to nourish his body ‘We are all here because he likes to drink and now he has the temerity to refuse to eat’. Fighting an undeveloped and underfunded health system, fighting her father’s decline and deafened with the noise of a lifetime of memories, Pine sags under the responsibility of having to face each day, because there is nobody else to do it, and we owe that to our parents.

In 1980’s Ireland, couples did not usually publicly separate due to stigma, social awareness and the welfare of their children. Pine’s parents separated when she was five and immediately they lived apart. A period of tremendous poverty followed this, of damp rooms, persistent coughs and cold winters. Pine was a little girl used as a pawn in a game for grown ups, as seen in Speaking/Not Speaking. When the people spoke and divorce was finally brought into law in Ireland, it was with relief that Pine could look around. Her family finally had a name, a category and she was no longer alone.

With startling honesty, Something About Me recalls her need for control throughout childhood, that screaming need for love and nurture that simply wasn’t an option for her due to the financial constraints of their household which called her mother to work. Pine became a little thinner every day and the eating disorder grew rigidly around her, providing the structure and control that she so craved. A dark time saw her spiral into the club scene, dabbling in drugs and having such little respect for her body that she offered it to any man who promised temporary love. A little girl, damaged and tearful stands alone on these pages. Pine beautifully sketches a family wounded so much that they don’t know how to heal together, choosing instead to navigate through their own individual bleakness.

Having emerged as an adult from this clouded grey chrysalis, Pine is happily married with a man she has navigated the labyrinth of adult life with. Holding hands, they have faced the knowledge that their baby had no heartbeat, the knowledge that their country would not help them until their baby clinically died and they have emerged, weathered but deeply respectful of their tenacity. This is the history Pine brings with her, as she watches her father recover from a lifetime of alcohol abuse. Emilie Pine is an extraordinary writer, and her honesty and strength when her hope is being ravaged by the storms is nothing short of celebratory on the page. We cannot erase our battles, but by being truthful, we can reduce the power they hold over us.

a keeper by graham norton

We pick up titles from well known names because we expect a certain level of consistency from them. As readers, we want to be assured of a safe read and we expect to be welcomed back into the pages by those well known names. This was why I chose to read ‘A Keeper’ by Graham Norton this week. Aside from being at the top of the bestseller list and the eye catching cover.. well, it’s Graham Norton. The undeniable success of his first novel ‘Holding’ in 2016 established Norton as much more than a comedic household name and a resounding echo of respect was observed for his quaint yet haunting depiction of rural Ireland. The winning combination where Norton is concerned is his superb talent for sketching a relatable and vivid setting, together with his insights into the motivations of his characters.

‘A Keeper’ focuses on the return of Elizabeth Keane to Ireland, following the death of her mother. The Ireland to which she returns is packed with close knit communities, prying eyes from each window and a childhood confined to only one house. Structured in alternating paragraphs titled ‘Then’ and ‘Now’, Norton slowly unravels the sorrowful truth behind the life of Elizabeth’s mother in an unforgiving Ireland and we watch the wild landscape of coastal Cork as it cemented her fate in the mid 1970s. Elizabeth’s journey takes her to West Cork in pursuit of the truth and her story begins to run parallel to her mother’s.

The characters all seem to have at their core, a sense of morality, however skewed their understanding of this morality is. Family feuds are well developed in the novel, lending a strength and motivation to the actions of each character. I’m sure that Norton wanted us to understand 1970s Ireland with the same horror that I’m sure he felt when he wrote this novel. The problem with this is that I find the characters weak and when faced with any conflict or tension, they fold into docility. The result of this was that I was irritated when reading some scenes and found the plot difficult to believe in, not helped by the unnecessary adjectives and frequent inconsistencies in the cultural references. Overlooking this however, the storyline was engaging and the setting was so well established that I saw every inch of the West Cork coast in it’s rugged beauty.

Norton includes twists in the novel which are intended to bring a bittersweet resolution, an idea of history repeating itself but the pace of these twists is so fast and the reader is still processing the plot itself, that the twists provide no additional depth or zest to the conclusion. I felt that Norton wrote the conclusion not for the novel, but for what he felt the reader would want to read. It is possible that it is not just the reader who expects a certain level of consistency from a novel, perhaps the author is guilty of that also. If that is the case, Graham Norton has written with the burden of his 2016 success at the forefront of his mind and the result is a novel more Irish than Ireland itself. However, fact is oftentimes stranger than fiction and as a depiction of postcard Ireland, I enjoyed my time in West Cork with ‘A Keeper’.