Ireland

The Wonder, by Emma Donoghue

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Like some of Donoghue’s other novels, such as Room and Haven,  this story again follows people confined in a tiny location. In 1850s Ireland Elizabeth (Lib) Wright, an English nurse, is sent to a rural area to stay with an 11-year-old girl who supposedly can survive without food. Anna and her parents say she has not eaten anything for four months, only water and—Anna says—manna from heaven.

A committee made up of villagers, including the doctor and priest, want to prove that the girl is truly not eating anything. Their motives are mixed, as we learn, but they are deeply influenced by the Catholic church and its stories of saints and miracles. To show their earnest motives, they hire both Lib Wright, who’s been trained in scientific nursing principles by Florence Nightingale, and a nun to take turns keeping watch over Anna.

Donoghue is too good a writer to let the women be flat symbols of science and religion. They are far more complex than that, and both waver into the liminal area between them. The story is told from Lib’s point of view, and she rails about the malign influence of the Catholic church and the way superstition and ambition play on the members of the committee.

Most of the story takes place in Anna’s small bedroom in the rough, rustic cottage where Lib requires the girl be isolated to ensure no one is slipping food to her. Even the parents must keep their distance except for a morning and evening greeting from her mother. Lib often clashes with the mother, such as insisting that pilgrims no longer crowd the cottage to see The Wonder and beg for her to bless them—before leaving a monetary offering of course.

Catholic doctrine and rituals guide the family’s days and nights. Anna prays constantly; her only books are religious texts. Lib herself is a sceptic and not religious at all. A veteran of the Crimean war and a short-lived marriage, she is determined to unmask the fraud quickly, so she can return to her hospital in England. Yet Anna, so smart and so sincere, begins to affect her during the long eight-hour shifts, just the two of them in the tiny room.

Among the other themes percolating through the story are ideas about food—it has not been that long since the potato famine in Ireland—and grief and the effects of isolation. I treasured the tiny hints of family, such as the destitute young cousin the family has taken in, and community where neighbors generously come up with scarce items such as extra mattresses and pillows.

Writers often talk about the ‘sagging middle’ where stories begin and end strongly but not much happens in the middle, leading to the reader giving up on the book. I gave up on this book several times. It seemed to drag on without much happening. Lib’s complaints about the Catholic church became repetitious as well, though perhaps that’s my fault, and  I’ve just read one too many books about the very real suffering of the Irish under the rule of a power-hungry church.

One solution to the ‘sagging middle’ is to include a turn in the very middle of the story. Sometimes called the fulcrum, hinge, or mirror moment, something happens that dramatically changes the protagonist and the course of the story. Not giving anything away, there is such a turn here which was interesting. However, I still struggled until the story picked up near the end.

I think what kept me going was my strong interest in that liminal moment in the 19th century when science challenged the church’s teaching. It seems important to revisit that time now when science is once again being thrown out in favor of gossip and superstition. And as a result, children are dying.

What period in the past gives you insight into today’s challenges?

Walk the Blue Fields, by Claire Keegan

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In this second collection of short stories, the author of the remarkable novella Small Things Like These takes us to rural Ireland. The seven stories occur in the modern day but they seem timeless, as though they could be happening anytime in the last century. Partly this sense comes from the rural setting, where so little has changed, and partly because of the psychological realism of Keegan’s characters. We know these people.

Keegan is a brilliant writer, able to condense masses of meaning into a few pages, and those so clearly written that you almost miss the layers they encompass. I’ll just mention a couple of the stories, and tread lightly so as not to ruin them. As with the best stories, several of them turn on a secret revealed, and I would not spoil your discoveries.

As the title story begins, we are placed in a chapel decorated for a wedding, and a priest ready to officiate. The ceremony itself is dispensed with in a few sentences; the story concerns the immediate aftermath—the photos, the hotel reception, the speeches—as filtered through the priest’s eyes. We do not know his name since he is only referred to as “the priest” or called “Father.” It must be a poignant moment when you lose your identity and begin to be held at arm’s length.

A melancholy air comes forward as the priest locks up the church and heads to the reception. He’d rather walk down by the river, but the hotel is “where his duty lies.” As he walks down the avenue,

On either side, the trees are tall and here the wind is strangely human. A tender speech is combing through the willows. In a bare whisper, the elms lean. Something about the place conjures up the ancient past: the hound, the spear, the spinning wheel. There’s pleasure to be had in history. What’s recent is another matter and painful to recall.

Then we are caught up in the whirl of the reception. The scene comes to life through the banter, the details, the people described so acutely. I won’t go on; just know that you are in the hands of a master, and the story will take you to surprising places. The ending is particularly satisfying in the way tiny, almost unnoticed details from the beginning of the story come into play.

The combination of realism and lingering remnants of legends and superstitions are even more central in the last story, “The Night of the Quicken Trees.” That is ancient name for the rowan tree or mountain ash, well known for its magical properties.

Margaret Flusk—”a bold spear of a woman . . .  not yet forty”—moves into an isolated house on the coast in the autumn. The house had belonged to a priest, now dead, and is joined to another house of the same size. It’s inhabited by a forty-nine-year-old bachelor named Stark, who has an odd relationship with his goat Josephine. A blend of comedy, folklore, and the way isolation and loneliness can set a person askew, the story is surprising and inevitable at the same time.

I love the morning when Stack first comes to her door. “Margaret wasn’t dressed. She was scratching herself and thinking. She liked to roam around in her nightdress having a think, drinking tea in the mornings.”  Such a great description of someone used to living alone.  

I saw an interview with Keegan in which she said that rather than planning out her stories ahead of time, she lets her main character loose and follows their footsteps. Perhaps that is why we get the sense of discovering the story—and the story behind the story—along with her.

Although these quiet stories speak of lost opportunities, escape, and desire, they are told with “a measured, almost documentary reserve,” as one reviewer put it, which give the reader a little psychological distance, thus enabling us to appreciate the tiny moments that carry considerable meaning, as well as the larger threads of timeless situations and how people survive them.

What short story collection have you come across that entranced you?

Haven, by Emma Donoghue

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My horror at the devastation wrought by evangelical “Christians” (who eschew the basic tenets of Christianity) in the U.S. made this novel tough going for me. I couldn’t get past my outrage that anyone would submit themselves to torture and starvation in the name of religion when salvation—an earthly one to be sure—was so easily available.

Donoghue, author of Room, has constructed another story where people are confined in a tiny location, dependent on the whims of an all-powerful tyrant. In 600 A.D. Cluain Mhic Nóis, an Irish monastery, hosts a visiting holy man, perhaps the holiest man on earth: Artt, legendary for having read every book in existence and surviving the plague with the loss only of a finger.

While there, Artt has a dream—surely a holy vision!—that he should found a new monastery on a remote island off the Irish coast, far from the earthly temptations that have, in his view, corrupted Cluain Mhic Nóis. The dream/vision/mandate from God further commands that he take two of the monks: Cormac, an older man who came late to religion and is fond of telling stories, and young, impressionable Trian, who was given to the monastery at 13.

They fetch up on a stony isle that it is hard to imagine anyone could survive a week on, though the author’s note assures us that it is indeed the site of a medieval monastery. The fascination for me was in the various ways they—mostly Cormac to be honest—find to survive in this hostile environment. Trian, too, captures the heart with their sweetness and love for everything—birds, fellows, mussels, God. Artt is just, in my opinion, a self-righteous, narcissistic blowhard, convinced that he alone is the conduit of God’s word.

Well, obviously I’m the wrong audience for this book. I could hardly bear continuing to read of their hardships, knowing that civilisation—with, sure, its evils, but also actual sustenance and shelter—is only a short boat ride away. The writing is gorgeous but the story infuriating.

I have my moments of thinking like Artt that the world is incurably decadent, and wanting to preserve some small piece of what life could really be like. But this is not the way. And I’m far too practical to take my minions, even if I could bear to have minions, away from necessities like food, water and shelter to create religious monuments. Nor could I ever sacrifice others to my vision of my own greatness.

So, while I admire the prose, the story left me cold. No, not cold, but a turbulent mix of emotions: frustration, anger, sadness, a hint of longing. The book challenged me to think outside my own box, a challenge I guess I failed. Still, I’m left thinking of John Lennon’s Imagine: no religions, nothing to die for.

Have you read a novel that challenged you?

Old God’s Time, by Sebastian Barry

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Tom Kettle is a retired Irish detective, living out by the coast, in a lean-to attached to an old castle. In retirement, he does nothing or, as he says, stays “stationary, happy and useless.” For nine months he has treasured his empty days, when they are interrupted by two junior detectives appearing at his door.

They’ve come to ask for his help with an old case, one Tom worked on: the murder of a priest who had been accused of abusing children. But this is no police procedural, with a brilliant sleuth and a puzzle for the reader to figure out.

There is a puzzle for sure, but much of it has to do with how much Tom can rely on his own thoughts. His mind moves plausibly between day and dream, present and past, until the reader is left wondering whether a visitor is real or a ghost, if things happened the way Tom described them yesterday to the way he describes them today.

He’s buried under the weight of the past. The abuse he endured in the orphanage, witnessing the sexual assault of boys “with the light in their eyes put out” by the priests was still not as awful as his wife’s suffering in the convent. Later, he thought they’d outrun the priests and the horrors, him doing well in the Garda, June raising their two smart and wonderful children. But those cautiously happy years have been erased by the repeated traumas of his police work and by his unbearable losses.

His memory slips around like a Rubik’s cube, realigning sometimes in a new pattern or falling into chaos. He cannot trust his own mind, his own senses. He becomes friends with another tenant of the castle, a cellist—or was that a dream? Tom often hears the cellist practicing Bruch’s Opus 47, an adagio based on the Kol Nidre, a Hebrew and Aramaic declaration that is associated with the “day of atonement” in the Jewish calendar.

Just as Tom navigates his slippery sense of reality, the reader is carried from a scene of pure realism into stream of consciousness into dreams and memories. It’s a brilliantly written book. I had to pay attention, and sometimes be patient, but I never lost the thread of the story. I wondered at some of the detours, but in the end could see they were all necessary.

This is a story about trauma, how it is carried in the body and the mind, how it endures into the next generation. Tom Kettle has his code. He struggles to hold onto his integrity even as he tries to sort out in his own mind what is true and what is not.

In my book club we often talk about how some novels require an extra effort from the reader, a bit more thought, a little more patience. I won’t deny that Barry’s novel is difficult to read, both because of its slippery narrative and the terrible descriptions of abuse, but it is well worth the effort. It’s unforgettable.

Have you read a novel by Sebastian Barry? What did you think about it?

Night Boat to Tangier, by Kevin Barry

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Two aging Irish gangsters sit in the Algeciras ferry terminal. It’s October 2018 and, though they’ve been drug dealers since their teens together back in Cork, earning fabulous sums and losing them in failed business deals and their own drug habits, that’s not why they are there waiting for the next boat from Morocco to arrive. They pester the young man behind the hatch in the INFORMACIÓN booth since they don’t understand the Spanish announcements over the PA. He ignores them.

Maurice Hearne and Charlie Redmond sit on a bench just a few yards west of the hatch. They are in their low 50s. The years are rolling out like tide now. There is old weather on their faces, on the hard lines of their jaws, on their chaotic mouths. But they retain – just about – a rakish air.

They are in search of Maurice’s 23-year-old daughter who left Ireland after her mother’s death to wander the earth among other new age travellers. The two men have information—having “persuaded” a young traveller earlier—that she will be coming through the ferry terminal on this day. They hand out missing persons posters and question the tired, distracted passersby.

Dilly Hearne, Charlie says. She’s a small girl. She’s a pretty girl.

She may just possibly have done us over, Maurice says.

It’s in her blood to, Charlie says.

Green eyes, Maurice says. Off the mother she took a lovely set of Protestant eyes.

Cynthia. God rest her. She had the palest green eyes.

They were like the fucking sea, Maurice says.

Among the chapters in the terminal that read like a screenplay are other chapters set in the past, flashbacks that illuminate the incidents that got them to this place. Fractured, as memories are, the flashbacks help us understand the old weather on the men’s faces. “He was more than possessed by his crimes and excesses – he was the gaunt accumulation of them.” They help us understand what it is to be an Irish man riding the wave of the Celtic Tiger and then stranded by its withdrawal and their own failures.

They were hammering into the Powers, the John Jameson, it was breakfast from the bottle and elevenses off the mirror. The child would as well be raised by the cats that sat lazily in what April sun troubled itself to come across the rooftops of Berehaven.

These are damaged men: physically, emotionally, morally. It’s the last that stands out for me. Instead of romanticised gangsters, we get real men and their crimes, the risks and violence, and the effect of all that trauma on their souls. One could complain that there’s no mention of the effects on their victims, other than neglected baby Dilly. Yet that omission comes across as genuine: we are in Maurice and Charlie’s point of view, and how their doings might hurt others is simply not something that would occur to them.

Equally, their limited point of view explains why Cynthia, Maurice’s wife and Dilly’s mother, seems not fully fleshed out. Even when talking about his great love for her, it’s all about Maurice: “He adored Cynthia the first time he saw her. When she turned the twist of a smile on him, he felt like he’d stepped off the earth.” And “The first six months on heroin with Cynthia were the most beautiful days of all time. Love and opiates – this is unimprovable in the human sphere.”

Yet Barry is brilliant with tiny evocative characterisations. Here’s his description of a farmer that Maurice meets in a mental hospital: “Some misfortune netted from the hills of the country, Maurice guessed, who listened to the rain too insistently, maybe, until he took his instructions from the voices within it.”

Barry’s descriptions of place are equally strong, summoning atmosphere through sometimes surprising images:

It was a little after 4 a.m. on a January night. It was in the long, cold sleep of the winter. The shapes of the city were blocked out above the dark river, against the moonless sky. On the southside quays only the ghosts of the place traipsed by the doorways or idled on the steps of the river wall with their stories of old love. The black surface of the river moved the lights of the city about. It was hard not to believe sometimes that we were just the reflection, and that the true life existed down there in the dark water.

In an interview with the LA Times, Barry said “No matter what I’m writing, whether it’s a short story or a novel, it almost always starts with a place. It’s the atmosphere the place gives off, the vibration you get off the place, that’s usually what creates the desire to write something in response to it.”

Algeciras is certainly a perfect place to draw out the contradictions of these characters. Terminals—whether ferry or airport—are liminal spaces, despite the finality of their name. Similarly, stations—bus or railroad—make me feel as though I’ve stepped out of my life into a sort of limbo. What better place to take a hard look at what you’ve done with your life.

The flow of language carries you along irresistibly, page after page, a brilliant example of dialogue where all the meaning is in the subtext. You think it’s just kerfuffle and then you see it’s a lot more. The dialogue is also a great example of how to suggest dialect with word choice and order.

In the same LA Times interview, Barry said of the book, “It’s built on talk . . . It’s built on dialogue. One of the interesting things about Irish people is talk. We love the sounds of our own voices. We talk a lot and say very little. It’s what’s going on under the surface of the talk is what’s interesting.” He also said, “I think every good story or novel has its own kind of tune or a melody, and as a writer what you’re doing is trying to hear the music of it.” It’s that music that lures you on.

It’s true that I’ve been trying to read different voices, and there’s certainly no lack of novels about white male gangsters. Yet I could have happily listened much longer to these two men talk, with their humor and profanity and their evocation of a long friendship. But what makes this book stand out for me, more than its humor, beautiful descriptions and incredible dialogue, is its moral discernment, its subtle depiction of the erosion of the soul.

Have you read any of Kevin Barry’s work?

This Is Happiness, by Niall Williams

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At 17, Noel Crowe goes to live with his grandparents in the small rural village of Faha in County Clare, Ireland. Sixty years later he remembers the events of that remarkable season which started on Easter Sunday when the rain stopped.

It rains all the time in Faha. Sometimes it is a hard rain, sometimes a mist, and anything in between. The rain loves the earth in Faha. Noel helps his grandmother, Doady, race out and hang clothes on the line for a ten-minute dry span. So when the sun comes out and stays out, it might be a miracle.

The other remarkable event on Easter Sunday is the arrival of Christy, a middle-aged man who works for “the electrics” and will be staying in Doady and Ganga’s cottage, sharing the loft with Noel. For electricity is finally coming to Faha, bringing not only light to the unsuspecting villagers, but the previously unknown modern world. And Christy has a secret agenda.

I have not enjoyed a novel this much in a long time. It took me a little while to adjust to the pace, somewhat slower than we might be used to, but appropriate for this tale of a time measured in a horse’s clopping hooves or a bicycle ride. There is conflict and suspense, too, as in any story, and mysteries to be explored. Conflict doesn’t have to be a battle or a car chase; it can grow out of miscommunication and missed connections.

Through Noe, as he’s known, we enter into the life of the village: the doctor with his three beautiful daughters, the young priest whose well-known goodness leads him keeping the church door unlocked so thieves don’t have to break in. There’s a forge rather than a hardware store and of course the farms.

In the fields, cattle, memories dissolved by so many liquid mornings, noons and nights, had forgotten they dreamed of April grass and, by a clemency reserved for those who live placid in a perpetual now, standing in a green sweetness forgot the cold muck-grazing of February.

There’s a lot of gentle humor here. Williams describes the eccentric villagers with compassion and often a deft turn of phrase. In such a small village people must get along, no matter how oddly their neighbors behave. Noe and Christy take to riding Doady and Ganga’s bikes around to pubs—where of course it’s only polite to have a bottle of stout or three—in search of the legendary Irish musician Junior Crehan.

But it’s the language that lays a spell on me. Writers are often advised to avoid too much dialect because it can be challenging for the reader. I once actually had to give up on a novel written in broad Glaswegian dialect after only a few pages. Instead we are advised to find a way to suggest the lilt of an accent through the music of our sentences: the choice of words and the way we arrange them.

Williams is a master at this, and rewards careful study. Every now and then he’ll throw in an Irish phrase, but mostly it is simply the music. The villagers’ memory is embedded in story, stories told over and over, that become the fabric of their share life.

The known world was not so circumscribed then nor the knowledge equated with facts. Story was a kind of human binding. I can’t explain it any better than that. There was telling everywhere. Because there were fewer sources of where to find out anything, there was more listening.

And the other part of the binding is the old songs, traditional Irish music:

Gilbert Clancy… said the pipes recalled what couldn’t be remembered, the old bard times, and in their melancholy and joy was this world and another.

I loved being a part of this community for the space of this novel and will be looking for more of Williams’s books.

Sometimes we like novels or appreciate or even admire them. What novel have you read recently that you simply enjoyed?

Green Card & Other Essays, by Áine Greaney

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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what it means to be home. Many people are working from home these days. All the years I worked in offices I desperately wanted to work from home. Even now I remember each and every snow day when I was allowed to work remotely as a sacred and blessed time.

I know there are many who struggle with this new reality, extraverts who miss the interaction with others. And it’s true that I valued being able to step down the hall and get Laura or Jonathan’s input on some task. Still, this being at home to me is nirvana, to be able every day to be in this space that I designed for myself.

But home is more than this house, this place we’ve carefully adapted to our needs. It is also the places where we suddenly and unexpectedly know we are where we belong. For me, that was the first time I crossed the Tappen Zee bridge into New England. And again that early morning landing in England, a March morning, frosty and cold. Faced with a standard transmission car with the gear shift on the opposite side and traffic patterns that challenged my orientation, still, for all that, I knew suddenly that I had come home. I was in the right place. Many return visits over the years have only confirmed that initial sense of belonging.

For Greaney, that’s not the point. These brief essays fold us into the experience of leaving one not-unloved-home for another, of trying to find your way in an alien culture where you don’t recognise most of the references and your accent is legitimate fodder for jokes.

Immigration is much in the news these days, but it’s important to notice, as Greaney points out, that there are plenty of immigrants who are welcomed without question. When someone who has been complaining about immigrants says to her “Oh, not you . . . We weren’t talking about you,” Greaney appropriately responds, “’English speaking? White?’”

Interactions like this show up the racism inherent in today’s discussions about immigration. A white friend of mine who emigrated from South Africa, likes to challenge people by saying, accurately enough, “I’m African-American.”

Greaney explores the lingering strangeness. Not just the bizarre experience of St. Patrick’s Day celebrations in the U.S., but also seeing what U.S. prom night is like versus a quiet 1970s mass after Leaving Cert exams, commuting among pumpkin and alfalfa fields, wondering if the New England Methodist church down the road might hold a way forward for a Catholic girl.

One of the most affecting essays in this collection calls on Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn where

. . . once Elilís Lacey (the daughter) steps aboard that ship, there are two separate and mutually invisible narratives—the tale of Eilís in Brooklyn and that of her widowed mother and stay-at-home sister back in Enniscorthy. Between those stories is an emotional firewall that blocks all knowledge of the other’s experience and, by extension each other’s respective wounds and losses.

Any of us who have left our first home for a new and different world can identify with this dual storyline, this firewall: a parent who cannot or will not imagine our new lives. Excitement and terror and sadness swirled together to forge determination.

These are beautiful essays: short, intense, emotionally precise, moving. I loved the essay about the gifts her father slips to her as she is leaving to return to the U.S. “’You’ll need this over yonder,’” her says, and Greaney pulls us around to see, yes, oh yes, they are needed.

What does the idea of “home” mean to you?

Fall of Poppies: Stories of Love and the Great War

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This new anthology comes in the middle of the centennial of the Great War, later called World War I. Usually when we think of centennials we think of celebrations, but this occasion is one for remembrance, with all the mixed emotions memory evokes.

I have written before about the reasons for my intense interest in this war. Poets like Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon took me beyond the dry facts of schoolroom history. My fascination grew as I began to realise just how much those few years changed Western culture and influenced all that has happened since.

These stories all take place, at least in part, on Armistice Day, 11 November 1918, when the war ended, not in victory or defeat so much as in exhaustion. They are love stories: romantic love, love between parent and child, love of a native or adopted country. They express on a personal level what that day meant.

The authors—Jessica Brockmole, Hazel Gaynor, Evangeline Holland, Marci Jefferson, Kate Kerrigan, Jennifer Robson, Heather Webb, Beatriz Williams, and Lauren Willig—come to that day in different ways. Some stay firmly in that day while others start before or after. Stories are set in Paris, Brussels, Kenya, Dublin, the English village of Brimsworth, even Pelahatchie, Mississippi.

All are haunted by loss. The indescribable losses of those years, falling on a population accustomed to peace and plenty, left everyone terrified whenever the postman stopped at their door, as Hazel Gaynor describes in her story “Hush”. On the first day of the Battle of the Somme, British forces experienced 57,470 casualties, 19,240 of whom died. French and German forces also suffered huge numbers of casualties.

Yet even with the omnipresent losses, these are stories of unexpected connection. Evangeline Holland’s narrator in “After You’ve Gone”, Morven, is a woman of color from Scotland, without money or friends in Paris when she meets a man who has a surprising link with her past. In Kate Kerrigan’s “The Photograph” set in the present day, Bridie learns something new about her beloved great-aunt that helps her find a way forward in her current troubles. In “Hour of the Bells” Heather Webb’s heroine, Beatrix, the native German widow of a French clockmaker-turned-soldier, undertakes a journey out of despair that leads to surprising encounters.

If there is consolation to be found in contemplating these cruelly hard times, it is this: that in the midst of death, we are alive. Even in our great grief, we can be touched and at least a little healed by love.

What stories of World War I have you read?

Nora Webster, by Colm Tóibín

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Newly widowed Nora doesn’t want to answer her door. In the Irish town of Wexford in the middle of the 20th century, it is customary for people to stop by the home of someone in mourning in the evening. Without phones there’s no way to call first to see if they are welcome, so they just come and knock on the door.

Despite her yearning to be alone, Nora always opens the door. To a neighbor who commiserates with her, she says, “‘They mean well. People mean well.’”

Bound by convention, missing her husband’s steady presence, Nora must begin making her own choices. As the sole support for her four children, she is first confronted with financial decisions. Later she has to contend with emotional issues as her two young sons come to terms with their own grief. Their two older sisters are away at school.

Nora is a fascinating character. She does not seem to be close to anyone, now that Maurice is gone. Though she says at one point that she never loved her mother, she’d expected at some point they would find a place to meet. However, it hadn’t happened before her mother has passed away. Nora is not interested in being with her two sisters and aunt, though she and they make the customary visits.

She is not even close to her children, thinking at one point “that she had never before put a single thought into whether they were happy or not, or tried to guess what they were thinking.”

She seems to hold herself at the same distance. Practical, focused on the everyday things that must be done, she barely touches the fringes of introspection. The reader, too, is held at a slight distance from her. Tóibín uses a close third person point of view, telling the story through Nora’s eyes, but her lack of self-analysis leaves us as much in the dark as she is. We hear her think one thing and then see her do the opposite, and have to assume that she is giving in to convention again or to what another person wants her to do.

When we discussed this novel in my book club, one person pointed out that much of the drama in this quiet book came from the space between Nora’s thoughts and her actions. Whether you call it drama or conflict or tension, I think that this analysis is accurate.

I called it a quiet book, though things large and small happen, and there are plenty of emotional upheavals. Another book club member praised the way political events of the time were woven into the story, giving it additional depth and universality.

In the end, though, what we all liked about this book was the close look at an ordinary life, one of the reasons we like Anne Tyler’s novels as well. A master storyteller like Tóibín can make us care about a single, ordinary individual. He can find the value in that life and as a result help us understand more about ourselves and our own lives.

In the first chapter, a neighbor Mrs. Lacey mentions her daughter. Ellis Lacey is the young woman whose story is told in Tóibín’s best-seller Brooklyn, recently made into a film. What did you think of that story? How do you think it compares with this one?

The Likeness, by Tana French

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In this second mystery from Tana French, the murder of a young woman drops like a stone into the world of her four friends, and of the detectives investigating it. Ripples spread, unsettling all of their lives and certainties and waking deeper currents.

I read this book and French’s earlier one, In the Woods, a few years ago, long enough ago that the details have faded but my memory of liking them hadn’t. That made them a good choice for listening to in the car on a couple of long trips: the story would come back to me enough that I wouldn’t have to concentrate hard to follow it but I could enjoy again the writing I loved.

The first person point of view makes these two books especially vivid. In the Woods is narrated by Rob Ryan, a detective in the Dublin murder squad. With The Likeness, his former partner Cassie Maddox, who has moved to the Domestic Violence unit, is pulled back and plunged almost against her will into investigating the death of Lexie Maddox, found stabbed in a remote cottage.

Frank Mackey, her boss from when she worked underground, back before the murder squad, persuades Cassie to impersonate the dead woman. The two young women look almost exactly alike, rare enough, but even more astonishing is that the dead woman had assumed the identity of Lexie Maddox, one of Cassie’s undercover identities. Mackie tells Lexie’s four friends that she survived and then sends Cassie in to live among them, to see if she can identify a suspect.

This is the part I loved. The five of them, PhD students at Trinity, live in a dilapidated country mansion which Daniel has inherited. He and Abby, Rafe, Justin, and Lexie are completely self-sufficient socially, a tight unit: innocently playful and sweet together, they become an armored phalanx among strangers.

Even just driving up to the house and seeing them on the steps Cassie is thoroughly charmed, in the deeper sense of being almost under a spell. It all seems so familiar. And the golden weeks that follow—working on the house together, dancing to Abby’s singing, reading and talking in the evenings—tempt Cassie with their promise of a different life. I was reminded of the beginning of Brideshead Revisited when Charles Ryder falls in love with Sebastian’s life. French captures so well the fun of being part of a tight group of friends, when you’re young and it’s all happening for the first time and everything seems unbearably sweet.

Even as Cassie slips more deeply into their easy camaraderie, though, she is looking for anything that might point to a suspect. She explores the local folks’ hatred for the house’s inhabitants and Daniel’s cousin’s frustration over not inheriting the house himself. She begins to see cracks in the family. She hears secrets whispered at night, notices Justin’s mounting fears and Rafe’s increased drinking.

There are plenty of questions to keep my mind buzzing, not just the big ones of who killed Lexie and why, but questions about each of the four friends, about why Lexie needed a new identity, about Mackey’s intentions and what Cassie herself will choose to do at each turn.

And the story is hauntingly beautiful at times, such as when we are drawn into the world these friends have created, their hour of splendour in the grass. There is much here about innocence and responsibility and the desire for freedom that can sometimes drown out everything else. And Cassie, with her strong moral code, her chameleon-like abilities, and her doubts and temptations makes an excellent traveling companion.

What books do you like to listen to in the car?