As Henrietta McKervey’s writing partner on an MFA programme at University College Dublin, I experienced her novel, The Heart of Everything, in a way which is different to most. We met every two weeks, supervised by novelist and short story writer Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, who guided us in analysing each other’s work. I was fed the novel gradually, over time, like one of the illiterate poor paying my ha’penny to hear the latest instalment of The Pickwick Papers read aloud on the street. It was a tantalising way to discover a novel which is, at heart, a mystery.
Frank McGuinness has described The Heart of Everything as “a wise novel that watches itself deeply, hiding its secrets, then spilling them spectacularly”, and for me this is where its power lies: in its careful construction, its gradual reveal of character and plot.
Mags Jensen is missing. Suspected to be in the early stages of dementia, the concern for her wellbeing is raised early. Her three adult children, Anita, Raymond and Elin, become detectives, retracing their mother’s steps, visiting her haunts, calling door-to-door with her photograph. In the process, they discover how little they really knew her. “Raymond himself wouldn’t have made it past the first round of Garda Petkova’s ‘Know Thy Mother’ quiz.”
Two events have fractured the family already, and mystery surrounds both. The first is the demise of Mags’ relationship with her husband. Raymond, Elin and Anita struggle to piece together childhood memories to catch a glimpse of who their parents really were, to unlock the secrets of their relationship. But it is an impossible task. There aren’t enough clues to be found in childhood memories for they are seen through gauze. “Children look at their parents through the wrong end of the telescope. We see them all out of perspective.” A scene where Raymond the child spies on his parents is particularly powerful. He watches his mother from the doorway: “He always had assumed her day ended at eight, same as his. And yet there she was, looking different. Acting different.”
There is also the question of why Anita and Elin do not speak. “At nine thirty, and for the first time in over seven years,
McKervey is a keen observer of family dynamics. “In a family the children’s lives are a big broth, different shapes and textures all mixed up together. Sometimes one ingredient grows stronger than another and temporarily determines the flavour of the dish, but it shifts and changes as you stir.” But she also sees how little we really know one another, that familiarity itself can be a bar to knowledge. Liz the florist, who assists in the search for Mags, speaks about her own father’s dementia. “My Dad had silent strokes for years before he was diagnosed, and we’d no idea. We weren’t looking, that was the problem. All we could see was the version of him we were used to.”
The siblings judge one another without really knowing what is going on in each other’s lives. Anita resents Raymond for shirking his duty, Raymond resents Anita for failing to tell him about Mags’ dementia. “How very Anita-ish to withhold information, then be sniffy with him for not knowing it, to cast him as the callous, careless one.”
As with a detective novel, withholding information is a recurring theme. Families are notorious for secrets: parents keep secrets from their children, children from their parents and partners from one another. For Raymond the librarian, “there are times when [his partner] is as unfamiliar to him as a punter in the library.” The youngest, Elin, has kept the truth of her relationship with her sister from the man that she loves. “How could he go to Dublin with her? It isn’t possible. Because he’d meet Anita. And more than that, far, far worse than that... he’d know the truth about Elin.”
But McKervey is also aware that we are often complicit in the secrets that we keep from one another. The notion of, “A conversation in which they both know there is another silent discussion going on between them. One in which they are less afraid,” is familiar to all of us, I think. For the reality is that we do not wish to be known completely. Nor do we wish to know others completely, especially those that we love. Elin’s boyfriend’s mother thinks of Elin as a free spirit. “Elin has let that become the accepted definition and explanation of her, when in fact it is so far from the truth.”
One of my favourite lines in the book is, “They have unpicked his mother’s life and still not found her hiding within it.” Because isn’t that always the case, whether we are missing or not? That our lives may be unpicked and we will still not be found? Do we not hope that that is the case – that we remain a mystery to one another? For what is the alternative?
The adult children cannot understand what has happened to their mother. “It is as though she has disappeared into thin air. This makes no sense. This is what happens in the first act of a thriller; it’s not how life plays out.”
The Heart of Everything is a novel full of mystery, a page-turner, a book you will consume greedily. But it is not a thriller. It is a novel not of artifice, but of truth. For “life is bloody and pointless and messy and – births and deaths the obvious exceptions – refuses to conform to any pattern.”
