Who does that Mags Jensen think she is?
Who is Mags Jensen when she’s at home? After giving us an affectionate picture of Mags beetling about in her house in Booterstown, Henrietta McKervey’s The Heart of Everything then spirits her away from the novel so that we are left with only a trace of Mags, a Mags-shaped space that the other characters attempt to colour in as they go along. So, what good is an invisible woman as the central character to a novel?
For me, The Heart of Everything, with its missing protagonist, is an exploration of constructed identity: the other characters construct the absent Mags as they wish or hope or imagine she is, without the real Mags getting in the way. The novel is a reminder that, as much as we’d like to imagine that the identity to which we cling is actually ours, it is really only partly ours and partly what others make of it.
All of the central characters are, themselves, a soup of identities: sister, brother, son, daughter, eldest, youngest, favourite, children’s author, mother of three, has-been soap star, along with the identities that they impose on one another, with sometimes devastating effect. The identities that they assign to Mags tells us a lot too about who the other characters are and how they work.
At the same time, Mags’ disappearance also becomes an ingenious way of exploring our attitude to ageing; something that McKervey has said was of interest to her when writing the novel. Mags’ invisibility becomes a useful metaphor for how we construct older age, particularly when we appreciate that Mags is also experiencing her own disappearance of herself, through her memory loss.
It is our experience in Age & Opportunity that many older people feel invisible in public spaces, whether they are waiting to order in a café or are an older actor waiting in vain for a call-back. Like Mags losing her own identity, many of them feel their own invisibility quite acutely and while some rail against it, others accept it as if, in some way, they deserve it.
This type of attitude has its place in the stereotype about “disengagement”: that older age was somehow a time when someone would slowly disengage from all aspects of their life as they moved towards death. While that stereotype has been roundly disproved and challenged, it leaves a very long tail of peculiar, unhelpful attitudes.
Artist Kate Byrne’s series of large-scale portraits of older women from Bealtaine 2013, Nobody Photographs Me Anymore, perfectly encapsulated that sense that somehow, in an era where identities are constructed via photographs on Instagram, Snapchat and Facebook, it was decided that age had somehow rendered these women unworthy of photographing. Those honest, large-scale faces staring openly at the viewer from the gallery wall, thankfully, begged to differ.
It is, of course, not just about the creation of the image, but also about how people interpret that image. A point comes in the novel where Raymond becomes concerned that strangers who see the posters asking for help in locating Mags will just see “some old woman”, rather than his mother. Later, Elin is outraged when a passer-by doesn’t even bother to look at a flyer with Mags’ picture on it. These incidents capture perfectly that ageing invisibility, as well as the dangerous ground we all tread, drawing a circle around all of those we hold near and dear, claiming that they are special, while those standing just outside the circle are not and, therefore, not worthy of our time.
McKervey has created a familiar world of people just outside of our circle and she has encouraged us to care. She pieces together family dynamics that touch off the bruises of our own families. She rolls up all of the guilt, anger, jealousy, hurt, affection and love that goes into the Jensen siblings’ relationships and throws it to us, knowing that, if we don’t catch it, we are denying how all of those things exist in our own families. She is also showing us the space where Mags has been and asking us to put either ourselves or those we love into that space, and to understand.
For all of those invisible women (and men) out there, of course, it is not all bad news: there is hope. Although there is still a lot of ageism in all walks of life and it still feels like it will be some time before Ireland really embracing people with dementia, things are clearly shifting around how we, and those around us, construct our older age. People are punching holes in the stereotype of how to be older; some flamboyantly, others with a quiet determination not to be told how to live their own lives. During this month of May, Bealtaine is playing its part in increasing visibility, promoting adventures and suggesting new ways to live and be in the world as we age. As more of us live longer, healthier lives, we should all punch a hole in the stereotype, for Mags’ sake and our own, so that we can be seen for who we are, not for how others would construct us to be.
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The Heart of Everything by Henrietta McKervey is published by Hachette Books Ireland, £12.99. Hodges Figgis offers a 10 per cent discount on Irish Times Book Club titles. Throughout May, we will publish a series of articles by the author, fellow writers and readers exploring the novel, culminating in a podcast interview to be published here on May 31st.
