“Write a novel in the style of Megan Nolan” is a prompt that would flummox ChatGPT. Following her 2021 debut Acts of Desperation, an intimate first-person account of a toxic relationship/a “messy millennial woman” novel, which won a Betty Trask award, Ordinary Human Failings is a family saga and (sort of) murder mystery. “A proper novel, you know,” Nolan told The Bookseller, laughing.
It’s 1990, London. Tom Hargreaves, a tabloid hack desperate for his editor’s approval, happens upon the story of a girl gone missing on a housing estate. When three-year-old Mia Enright’s dead body is found by the bins the next morning, with bruising around the neck, Tom is doggedly determined to get the scoop.
The prime suspect is Lucy Green, a 10-year-old who was last seen playing with Mia. The Green family, from Waterford, keep to themselves but are looked at askance by their neighbours, who refer to Lucy as “that little scumbag”. (The Enrights, by contrast, are considered “saints”.) While Lucy is held for questioning, Tom sequesters her family in a hotel, offering them pocket money and “as much booze as they can drink” in exchange for exclusivity. He pitches the story as “Nineties Britain, the Battle of the Council Estate; feckless foreign wanderers with a whiff of abuse and chaos turn on the Deserving Poor”.
Some of the characters evolve; for others, realistically, change is out of reach
As the investigation continues, we flash back to late-1970s Waterford and the circumstances of the Greens’ departure from Ireland, told in a close third person from multiple points of view, bringing to mind Anne Enright’s The Green Road. We follow Lucy’s mother, Carmel, through a high-school love affair and a heart-wrenching account of her grappling with its consequences. In the waiting room of a London abortion clinic, where she is deemed too late to terminate, she exchanges glances and “shared shame” with a young woman with a Cork accent. “To be both Irish and unwantedly pregnant was unspeakable, wrong in a way that went beyond law.”
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We also hear from Carmel’s late mother, Rose, who looked after Lucy in light of Carmel’s indifference; her hermetic and rageful father, John, who had been abandoned by his first wife; and her alcoholic half-brother, Richie. “Who would care about a family like theirs?” Carmel wonders as the police embark on their investigation. “Theirs were ordinary human failings, tragedies too routine to be of note.”
The novel’s hybrid genre is seeded in its origins. Nolan started out “thinking it would be about a seismic crime and the tabloid investigation into it which would lead to a sprawling, state of the nation type of novel,” she explained in an Instagram post announcing the book. But as she began to write, “it became clear that the Irish family ... were the heart of what [she] wanted to write”. Where Nolan’s heart lies shows in the final product: she finds her stride in the family portrait, with the Greens – sympathetic despite their flaws – well-rendered.
Readers will revel in the delicate construction of Nolan’s sentences and fine attunement to the family’s inner lives
Among many poignant scenes, we watch Richie mess up a shot at employment and probably happiness by giving in to drink and peer pressure; the restaurant owner’s daughter who sacks him later regrets not having given him a second chance. Rose bristles with shame when she receives notice that her parents’ graves back home, which her sister had promised to look after, are being neglected. “She had no home now, and she suspected that no one would ever apologise to her for this loss.” A chance run-in with Lucy’s father, whom Carmel had been too proud to tell she was expecting, shows the gargantuan gap in the impact of the affair on each of their lives.
The tabloid storyline is less compelling, and an encounter between Tom and Carmel, which feels like an attempt to bring the book’s two strands together, strikes a brief false note. Far better to approach Ordinary Human Failings as literary fiction than as a whodunnit. “There is no secret, Tom, or else there are hundreds of them, and none of them interesting enough for you,” says Carmel. “The secret is that we’re a family, we’re just an ordinary family, with ordinary unhappiness like yours.” Readers will revel in the delicate construction of Nolan’s sentences and fine attunement to the family’s inner lives: Carmel’s dignity, Rose’s sacrifice, John’s humiliation, Richie’s despair.
Like Eliza Clark’s recent novel, Penance, Ordinary Human Failings explores the effects of class on the justice system, and one’s chances in life more broadly, as the Greens face the fallout of a legacy of neglect. Some of the characters evolve; for others, realistically, change is out of reach. “The things you did or failed to do could not be erased by anything, not even love,” Carmel comes to understand in a quiet but powerful conclusion. “But still, they tried. The trying would be the life’s work.”
