Amid the recent cornucopia of literature emerging from Northern Ireland, you’ll find novels about religious fundamentalism (Jan Carson’s The Raptures), female oppression (Olivia Fitzsimons’ The Quiet Whispers Never Stop), class and privilege (Michelle Gallen’s Factory Girls). There are novels set at the height of the Troubles (Louise Kennedy’s Trespasses), novels set during earlier historical events, such as the Belfast Blitz (Lucy Caldwell’s These Days), and novels whose setting is as distant and different as the Ubari desert, or the town of Roseville, Louisiana (Laura McVeigh’s Lenny). The work of Susannah Dickey (29) occupies an interesting place in this line-up. It is set in Northern Ireland, yet the experiences it records often feel ubiquitous — perhaps more generational than situational.
Dickey’s debut, Tennis Lessons (2020), was a coming-of-age novel set in an unspecified Border town. A close second-person narration brought us into the mind of our young protagonist whose worries and preoccupations included wanting to be more normal, enduring her parents’ failing marriage, and navigating the ominous world of sexual relationships.
Her second novel, Common Decency, is likewise a close character study, this time alternating between two central characters: Lily and Siobhán. Lily is a twenty-something recluse, grieving the recent death of her mother. Following this loss, Lily “has no ballast for her own sense of self, and her recourse is to an anger that she doesn’t fully understand”. This anger is channelled towards Siobhán, who lives in the same apartment block as Lily, but who is little more than a passing acquaintance. Siobhán is no less miserable than Lily — she is engaging in a self-destructive affair with a married man and “will endure any indignity to feel wanted” — but Lily perceives her to be unduly privileged and so begins performing secret, and increasingly malicious, acts of unkindness towards her.
Common Decency is a better book than Tennis Lessons: more assured, with a larger scope and a keener sense of its physical world. The ways in which our lives criss-cross, and the invisible similarities and connections we all share, are overarching themes. These may sound cheesy on paper, but in practice are quite moving. If at times the connections between characters feel inordinately fortuitous — the father of one character and brother of another die in the same road collision, for example — we are inclined to go with it, since this fortuitousness seems to be part of the book’s main fibre.
The point, it seems, is not to create a linear story with a believable plot (though there is a certain amount of this), but rather to create a beautiful, symmetrical formation. Images, metaphors, ideas and characters speak to each other across time and space. There are recurring lines and motifs (the ee cummings line “Not even the rain has such small hands” is one example), and although Lily and Siobhán are separate people, at times they seem to share an overlapping consciousness. Lily wondering “if living will ever ... reveal some new facet that isn’t so unbearable”, is not dissimilar to Siobhán feeling “so inescapably joyless that living seems an unnecessary expenditure of energy”.
With all this talk of inescapable joylessness, it could be easy to forget how funny and playful a writer Dickey is, so let it be said, this book is packed with wit. At one point, Lily describes her mother’s approach to language: “She treated [it] like a pet ferret she could dress in different outfits.” Dickey has a similarly bold and mischievous approach. Her style is lyrical, irreverent, at times slightly odd (who else would use the words “deservingness” and “pecuniary” in the same sentence) but admirably unique.
Place and cultural context are approached in an interesting way. We are in Belfast — we walk with Lily across Botanic, up University Street, down Elmwood Avenue, and so on — but the troubled history of the place is consigned to the periphery. An older generation prays the younger “will never have to experience something like that”. Outsiders “fetishise” the idea of coming from somewhere with such “incompatible cultural hegemonies squashed together”. The setting is almost incidental — until it is not, and Siobhán, whose personal life is in turmoil, also finds her eyes getting wet over a “young journalist” who has been murdered on the Falls Road, “caught between freshly radicalised young republicans and the PSNI”.
All of these aspects coalesce to create a text that is rich and absorbing, and point to a writer coming into her own, assured in what it is she is trying to do. For the reader, this is thrilling and engaging. We are carried along by the prose; we trust it knows where it’s going.
