“Are you only old when you have lived a long life, or are you old when you feel you’re near your limit, regardless of years?” So ponders the protagonist of Noel O’Regan’s debut novel, Though the Bodies Fall, a quietly moving story of stalled lives and lost chances. At 42, Micheál Burns lives alone in his childhood home, a small bungalow on Kerry Head a few miles away from the seaside town of Ballyheigue. Aside from his dog Sammy, the occasional terse phone call with his sister Áine and a weekly trip to the local shop for supplies, Mick has little contact with the outside world, largely it appears by his own design.
In these early chapters, O’Regan writes with a marked authority, allowing the reader to settle into the world, to experience the slow, lonesome days alongside Mick, who seems rooted to his isolation in as much as he’s rooted to the headland. Running concurrently to this careful depiction of everyday life is a thread of mystery, little hooks skilfully dropped, talk of “visitors” and desperate people, a memory of an impeccably dressed elderly gentleman doffing a homburg hat to Mick’s mother before telling her that he “must go”.
Not long into the narrative, the meaning of these asides becomes clear: the bungalow where Mick and his two younger sisters grew up is a known spot for suicides. Their formative years were spent in the awful shadow of this backdrop, their home literally and metaphorically poised on a cliff edge, their childhoods given over to worry, fear and extraordinary acts of heroism. The details are harrowing, a catalogue of pain documented in a clear, deceptively simple prose: “How every year is the same; the lead-up to Christmas always brings them ... on average, about seven a year – though one year there had been as many as twelve.”
The stories of these individuals are alternately given in a line, a paragraph, a few scenes, a judicious mix of insets that combine to form a powerful whole, but it’s the effect on Mick himself that gives Though the Bodies Fall its emotional heft. On the cusp of his teenage years, his mother – a saint or a zealot – calls on him to help the cause. The descriptions of these efforts are keenly felt, in keeping with Mick’s age: “He wondered if he should reach for the man, tackle him. A part of him felt like a goalie, waiting to see if he could save an impending penalty.”
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Reprieve comes in the form of college in Limerick, which gives the reader a break from the darkness in narrative terms and also works to show the clash of two very different Irelands that is at the heart of this book. Although its protagonist could technically qualify as an early millennial, the style, tone and setting of the book is a world away from that recent breed of fiction and more in the tradition of writers such as John McGahern and William Trevor, or for a contemporary comparison, the beautifully observed fiction of Belinda McKeon and Danielle McLaughlin.
From Tralee, O’Regan is the recipient of a 2022 Arts Council Next Generation Artist Award and his fiction has been published in the Stinging Fly, Banshee and the London Magazine. An editor with Mercier Press, his skills in that department can be seen in the careful weaving of past and present storylines in his debut. His relationship with Nadine, a competitive rower he meets in Limerick, is especially well drawn, from the tentative beginnings to the inevitable fights when Mick refuses to talk about his past: “How in the breathless rush of their arguing, he’d often lose his place, the tenuous thread of his righteousness.”
There is a pleasing noughties nostalgia to these college days, from low-slung jeans to shots of Goldschläger, details that work as a counterpoint to his religious upbringing. As the story progresses, Mick begins to interrogate his mother’s devotion to the cause, but more could be done to give a sense of her character. Likewise the chagrin of Mick’s sisters, who seem to unduly blame him for escaping to Limerick, even though he shouldered the burden for the three of them for years before this point. Áine in particular appears more as a cipher of sibling rivalry and unease rather than a rounded character in her own right.
These are minor gripes in an arresting and original novel that is grounded in its locale. From the stunning descriptions of the landscape, to the dialogue of dry Kerry wit, to the historical context of the nearby Gleann na nGealt (the Valley of the Mad), O’Regan makes great use of place to extrapolate upon his themes. In this way, Though the Bodies Fall reaches far beyond one family’s story, back through the ages to all the lives who have teetered on the edge.
