Emer McLysaght and Sarah Breen will no doubt delight their many fans across the country with this, the third book in their phenomenally successful Aisling series. The sharply observant duo have been hovering around the top of the Irish bestseller list since their debut, Oh My God, What a Complete Aisling!, hit the shelves in 2018.
Once, Twice, Three Times an Aisling continues their self-effacing heroine’s journey as she negotiates her life and times in her home town of Ballygobbard on the cusp of her 30th birthday.
The eponymous Aisling, for the uninitiated (and there must be an ever-decreasing number of those around), is a modern-day rural Irish Everygirl: kind, hard-working, fast-thinking and reliable, she manages to keep everyone’s best interests at heart while her own tender ticker (which she wears firmly adhered to her sleeve) is jostled and scratched and broken by that crazy little thing called love.
Aisling loves her Mammy and her best friend, Majella, and Tayto crisp sandwiches, and her omnipresent ex-boyfriend, John, and her successful café business, BallyGoBrunch, and the gourmet sausage sandwiches that she serves there to the amusingly idiosyncratic folk of Ballygobbard, many of whom she’s known since the day she was born.
Having been described as an Irish Bridget Jones, Aisling (herself a woman not averse to a sturdy pair of slimming knickers) has, on the evidence of the sales figures (a six-figure book contract with Gill Books and a film deal in negotiation), captured the hearts and minds of Irish readers.
Breastfeeding group
The third book continues in a Bridget-esque first-person confessional vein and focuses on Aisling’s attempts, as Majella’s solo bridesmaid, to knock her mate’s nuptials out of the park.
The story is peppered with acute social observations about small-town Irish life that have the gimlet-eyed authenticity of experience. Take Fr Fenlon knocking back his cappuccino when the breastfeeding group invade the cafe and start fiddling with their tops, or indeed Aisling’s recollections of the only two Corkonians she’s encountered, one of whom she met at a hen party, a Bantry woman who could mould a penis out of Play-Doh with her eyes closed.
Newly single, Aisling has a romantic liaison in this new novel, which, while not exactly setting her sesame buns alight, at least allows her to avoid Tinder and the fate of half the village who are “swiping left on their cousins and their old maths teachers and people they shifted in the handball alley in second year”.
It is Aisling’s relationship with new boyfriend James (who, God forbid, is an Englishman) that highlights – and possibly provides an antidote to – an uncomfortable sense of cosy national self-satisfaction that, at times, threatens to invade the book. An outsider, poor lost James, as Aisling comes to regard him, has a brittle, kaftan-wearing mother who has eschewed parenting for art, and is from a society where mammies don’t spend their days cutting the crusts off sandwiches for the men out harvesting in the fields.
Comfort zone
Aisling’s trip to James’s birthplace, and her insecurity when she’s taken out of her comfort zone and has to recognise that there are more complex choices to be made in life than whether or not to dip your Taytos in melted Dairy Milk, is possibly the most compelling section of the novel.
Aisling’s is a world, though, where incongruities are managed, where she can offer up a silent prayer of thanks to China for all the plastic tat she purchases for Majella’s hen party while Majella, herself a teacher, is busily responding to the all-too-real environmental fears of her young pupils. At least Aisling’s mother has cut the apron strings, thrown away the sliced pans and managed to monetise a flock of alpacas and a couple of environmentally sound yurts.
It feels churlish to criticise Aisling and her authors, all three of whom seem like terribly nice people. McLysaght and Breen offer their many readers a safe, convivial, unceremonious berth in challenging times. Theirs is a world where adversaries don’t get much more treacherous than a Tenerifian mosquito and, no matter how itchy life gets, there is always the kettle to put on and the pyjamas to curl up in and maybe even a mammy to knit you an alpaca jumper. It’s a winning formula.
It’ll be interesting to see how far Aisling’s creators allow their heroine to stray in the coming books. Who knows, keep the series going long enough and Aisling herself might be a knotty, kaftan-wearing old feminist herself by the end of it.
