Eve is hitting 40. Deserted by her partner, she moves from her Sandycove house into a downmarket flat in Bray with her daughter Addie, a super-articulate three-year-old who is Eve’s lifeline and tether, whose unpredictable oscillations between charm and tiresomeness make for a first-rate portrait as well as being a clue to the tenor and atmosphere of the whole proceedings. Completing the family unit is a fool of a dog, Alfie – and you might as well ask him what it’s all about as any of the characters.
Not that the novel itself is in any doubt as to its themes and interests, and conveys them in a slightly overdrawn, seemingly artless manner that is most effective and, at times, very funny (squirm-inducing early Mike Leigh – Abigail's Party, say – comes to mind).
At other times it touches on much less amusing lives going skewhiff and the unpromising times that are presently in it, the only times we have. And the time of the action is very much the present, so much so that it's possible to read the book as a parable of the current depression, or recession, or whatever we decide to call it (that uncertainty is a key to the world of The Playground).
However Julia Kelly is not a limiting, much less a limited, writer, and to give this piece of work a reductive reading pretty much rejects its spirit of openness.
In one way, The Playground is all about Eve moving in, but the unsettling process of trying to settle that she is going through is one that everybody around her is also dealing with, long-time residents as well as newcomers like Polish Ivanka or Eve's ill-chosen flatmate, Californian Joy.
These two characters initially come across as clichés, laughable in the rigidity of their outlooks – Joy’s her new-age righteousness, Ivanka with her authoritarian insistence on social discipline – and annoying in their attempts to prescribe their ideas for others.
The impression of stereotype doesn’t fully disappear, but it does emerge that these two don’t know better than anyone else, they only act that way as a means of finding a footing for themselves. The fact is, as Eve discovers, everybody here is an outsider. There’s nothing to be done but to keep going, even if nobody knows where. There isn’t really any right direction or right way.
Ideas of how to live are all fine and large, but it’s the messy business of actually living that’s the point.
The anarchy of the everyday is what the novel conveys so well, so unhurriedly, so unostentatiously, with much sly wit. Although as the neighbourhood teenagers show in the lack of restraint that typifies their momentariness, the anarchic factor can unpredictably and violently get out of hand. Back in her Sandycove days, Eve was “almost envious of . . . separated mums, their bravery, their freedom”, qualities that do apply to her, hapless as she is. But there is nobody to validate them.
Class, marriage, career, the frameworks that a person might identify with and find the safety of numbers in are of no avail in her small Bray square. An election takes place, its passing marked by no more than a fallen candidate poster being trampled underfoot.
Eve gets together with her mother and siblings for midnight Mass, an annual ritual. They sing Adeste Fidelis – "we boomed it out like Protestants" (not like the "faithful", who don't actually exist as such). Still and all, in Eve's neighbourhood there is a loose sense of community and some effort is made to give that an expression over and above visits next door and individual good turns.
The playground in the park around which the square is built is a readymade site to lend the expression form. This space is pretty much a no-go area, thanks to it being the resort of local teenagers. The use of any space – home, work, beach, park – is always being negotiated at some level or other and, making the playground available to everyone is a productive social fact, even if in the end it proves temporary, tainted and subject to conflicting narratives.
But when the mammies first wade in, clean the place up, restore it to its intended innocent purpose, there is a moment of accomplishment.
That doesn’t last either; the older kids, notably the alarming, unappeasable Billy, overshadow it. Billy is the only one who does anything permanent, which is not good for anybody and leads to conflicting narratives and the end of something, although also another start, whether for better or worse it’s hard to be sure, and also beside the point.
So, a novel that initially comes across as a sequence of cameos, set- pieces, memories and scenes of making it through this very minute, comes together in a stark climax, without foregoing its basic disparate method or without forcing the action. Quite a feat. Besides, the climax is not the end.
And let's not forget such moments when as Eve's mother, one of nature's tourists, with the Rough Guide to the Galapagos, and Eve at a party "talking about an article I'd read about fizzy drinks and brain development and I wasn't sure if I was rambling on without making any real points or drawing any conclusions, and my audience just nodded and smiled and picked bits of rocket from between their teeth".
As Julia Kelly shows to excellent effect, rough guides begin at home.
George O'Brien's one-woman show Molly is currently running in Washington DC.
