Eggshells: ‘methodically mad, laugh-out-loud funny, scalpel-sharp witty and deeply poetic’

Eggshells celebrates eccentricity; it’s a series of excursions into what order we might put on the absurd worlds we inhabit, and how shallow our frameworks of interpretation can be. It is methodically mad, laugh-out-loud funny, scalpel-sharp witty and deeply poetic, and the text catches its reader unawares time after time as it juxtaposes a cheerful getting-on with everyday things against a deep, largely unspoken sadness, expressed mostly through a fundamentally hapless search for origin and identity.

Caitriona Lally endears us to her protagonist from the outset; the most mundane occurrences become wonderful and fey from Vivian’s perspective. Vivian’s project is to find a way of being in the world which allows her both to accommodate her own extraordinary perceptions of things and yet to share in some degree of comfort the same space as everyone else. She is simultaneously desperately alone and utterly engaged with everything around her. But because her experience of the world is synaesthetic, because words appear to her to have an almost physical force and shape, and to resonate irresistibly with auditory and etymological echoes, because inanimate objects are imbued with agency (‘this pen has giddy ink’), and because everything must enact its own meaning, she experiences a sensory overload, and an irresistible impulse to response, that makes it difficult for her to communicate in a fashion that other people find appropriate.

The huge achievement of the book is to enlist the reader to Vivian's point of view, so that we see the quotidian world of Dublin through utterly fresh eyes, and begin to wonder why we never wondered about these things before. Why are so many letters apparently blued out in the street signs around the city? Why do some of the street names sound as if they're portals to another world? Why have we never noticed before the potential poetry when 'a sudden smack of blue and a postman comes out of the house further down the terrace. He's moving in and out of houses like a needle stitching a hem'? All those kiosks and grilled-off spaces – might they be crossing points to another world?

Vivian frequently copies lists of things in collections – of butterflies, of the components of the ink used in Islamic calligraphy – and makes lists of her own, too, sorting and recording things in kind according to her own perception of how things are related to each other. The novel is punctuated with these lists, as she tries to marshal the quotidian, multisensoryassault on her senses into some kind of manageable order; on every page Vivian tries to fit herself to the world she lives in one way or the other and to make sense of the shapes she assumes to try to achieve that fit.

Her walks around Dublin, carefully recorded, mapped then traced onto see- through paper and interpreted as near-fits for other countries or objects, are an externalised version of the attempt to perceive herself as being at least like something else; to map an almost transparent, paper-thin account of the days’ dealings onto something that has a fixed and recognisable being-in-the-world, recording an evanescent presence through her footfall in the city. The decision to grow into her own smell is part of the attempt to be a presence in one paradigm or another. And all the while, “I press my middle fingers alternately against the heel of my hands and whisper ‘safe safe safe’.”

Much taken with the sound of the word ‘escutcheon’, encountered at an exhibition, and cheerfully, confessedly oblivious to its meaning, Vivian thinks her gravestone should read “Here lies Vivian Lawlor: She Wasn’t Quite the Thing, But She Was Decorated With Escutcheons” (page 12).

Epitaphs are important; it’s the last chance, really, at definition, at a lasting inscription of oneself in the world. From early in the text, the reader has understood that there are multiple reasons why people might think Vivian Not Quite The Thing. She methodically sends a pinch of her great-aunt’s ashes to every address recorded in the great-aunt’s address book, and, because “my great-aunt seems to have stopped making friends when she hit ‘N’” selects a few random names from the telephone directory and sends some to them too. She knows that she needs to try on personas on order to appear to be participating in society (“I throw my eyes up to heaven and give a little snort, the way I’ve seen women do when they talk about their boyfriend”). She cannot look at herself in a mirror and wears by turns her own clothes in the order they emerge from the wardrobe (having accepted that Narnia’s not accessible through its back today) or her great-aunt’s suit, made to fit at the waist by the simple expedience of bunching it at the waist with a rubber band. She rehearses her own burial in the back garden.

The writing of an epitaph, though, is a defiant attempt at self-announcement. It has become clear, almost in passing, midway through the book, that Vivian is deeply scarred, and not just metaphorically. Her parents used to tell her she was a changeling, and passed her through water (did they attempt to drown her?) and through fire (did they attempt to burn her alive?), as her terribly scarred body, glimpsed in passing by her equally odd friend Penelope, bears witness.

So the escutcheons with which her body is in fact terribly decorated tell either how this social estrangement came about in the first place or explain how her strangeness prompted or allowed her parents to emblazon her little body in such a way. It’s a revelation so understated that it’s easy to miss. Lally’s Vivian actually speaks very little; most of what we hear goes on inside her head, and what binds her to Penelope, a woman equally at odds with the world, is Penelope’s ability to articulate at length. Not that we ever hear what she says, but only Vivian’s wonderment at the sounds she makes while she’s saying it. The gaps and silences in the text speak volumes; the noise in Vivian’s head, to which we are a privileged party, keeps much of what matters at bay.

Eggshells in published by Liberties Press. Amanda Piesse is an associate professor of English at Trinity College Dublin