Inch Levels begins with its protagonist, a history teacher in his thirties called Patrick, terminally ill in a hospital bed in 1986. He receives a handful of visitors: his distant and aloof mother Sarah, his beloved older sister Margaret, and his despised brother-in-law Robert. When a nurse overhears him mumbling some childhood reminiscence, she remarks that "This was standard . . . The patients tended to go back as the end drew near: to evaluate and shuffle memories, reassessing, considering."

This more or less sets out Neil Hegarty’s fictive stall: his debut novel comprises a series of flashbacks illuminating the pregnant awkwardness of these tense hospital visits. Though the story ostensibly hinges on an unsolved murder – of a little girl, many years ago in the eponymous Co Donegal reserve – it is in truth an exploration of personal relationships.

Sibling relations

We learn that Patrick and Margaret had been very close in childhood. Patrick recollects a seaside sojourn on which Margaret, in a fit of jealousy (“potent fury at her brother’s position, his privilege based on nothing”), clumsily attempts to drown him in full view of their father; to save his sister from a thrashing, Patrick tells him they had been playing a game. On another occasion, Patrick sabotages Margaret’s birthday party, embarrassing her in front of her classmates. Despite her tears and humiliation, the scene ends in cuddles between the siblings. Their mother, we are told, was “not a hugging kind of lady”, and they found in each other the warmth and love their mother withheld from them.

When Margaret meets and marries Robert, an unprepossessing working-class lad from Belfast, in her early 20s, Patrick is less than enthused. The force of his animus – he feels a constant compulsion to put Robert in his place; he consciously wishes him ill – would seem to point to an unhealthy, vaguely incestuous jealousy. As it happens, he is proved right: the marriage is an unhappy one, and Robert – himself brutalised in the Troubles – mistreats Margaret. Looking back, she insists she “had known she was marrying him on the rebound: not from another man, but from her family, from her mother, and with a sense of desperation”.

Formative years

The inscrutable Sarah is the psychological fulcrum of this story. Patrick recalls how Margaret would be “reduced to jelly . . . or to gasping, wordless fury, or to supplication” by her mother’s aggressive door-slamming and her patronising put-downs. Even as an adult, Patrick cannot help suspecting that his mother’s donning of pastel cardigans and scarves, and jasmine and rose perfumes, is a deliberate “disguise” – an attempt to pass for a harmless, old lady and hide her true, vicious nature. Having thoroughly primed the reader to dislike Sarah, Hegarty takes us back to her own formative years, in wartime Donegal. Her mother had died prematurely, and her father took out his grief on Sarah, subjecting her to violent physical assaults from which she eventually fled. At the end of her ordeal she resolved henceforth to “[S]alt away her weakness”, to protect herself and others.

Thus the terrible coldness of Patrick’s mother – “who liked to keep herself to herself, who never took his hand, who kept her gloves on, always” – is accounted for. This novel perceptively spotlights the way toxic parenting has a way of handing itself down like an heirloom: the abused becomes an abuser in turn, and the cycle perpetuates. In case this all sounds rather bleak, Hegarty also raises, in the tentative thawing of relations between Margaret and her mother towards the end of the novel, the glimmer of hope that openness and understanding can foster reconciliation and break the cycle. As a society we have only relatively recently begun to break the taboo over discussing such things; so much unnecessary misery might be averted if we can keep the conversation going.

Cool intensity

With its childhood vignettes, seaside setting and preoccupation with the quiddities of memory – Patrick sardonically likens his gallery of unwanted recollections to “his old personal tapeworm” – Hegarty’s novel is somewhat reminiscent of John Banville’s 2005 Booker Prize winner,

The Sea

. If it lacks the sparkle of Banville’s linguistic virtuosity, the cool intensity of Hegarty’s prose nonetheless lends it an apposite tone of weary reproach.

Inch Levels

is a decidedly moral book, insofar as it concerns itself with the connection between personal conduct and human happiness: “It is an easy matter to keep a secret . . . but the price is a deformation of the soul.” But it is not, crucially, moralistic: Hegarty’s narrator acknowledges that “we sometimes read history backwards”, and Patrick’s account is punctuated by retrospectively imagined presentiments, doubt and uncertainty. Unsettling and thought-provoking, with just enough ambiguity and nuance to convince, this is a bold and well-crafted debut.

Houman Barekat is a literary critic