Seán Farrell’s tremendous debut novel is set in the late 1980s in Co Meath, but save for a few grounding details – mentions of Chernobyl and New Kids on the Block, trips to Trim and Kilmessan – it floats free of the constraints of period and setting. And although we become intricately attached to its small cast of characters, it also operates on a powerfully symbolic plane, gripping its Oedipal core within tight nets of anxious tension.
A diminished and damaged family is at its heart: a mother and her two children, a daughter referred to throughout as B, and a younger son, the narrator, Michael, whose name is rarely used and whose age is indeterminate.
B and Michael’s absent father, we are briefly told, is an Irish actor who has abandoned them and, thereafter, appears only as the probable origin of occasional abusive phone calls. Their mother is English, and it is her well-to-do parents – her father is a master of hounds – who have arranged for them to live in an isolated house, in return for which they insist that the children are eventually sent to a boarding school.
As a result, B spends her weekdays away from home, and Michael is left as the primary focus of his mother’s attention, even as she struggles to manage their smallholding and to make ends meet. But from the outset, there is a threat lurking in the shape of sheep-farmer “Jerry Drain” (“Gearóid Ó Direáin is my name. People up here in Meath call me Jerry Drain because they can’t speak Irish,” he tells them), himself a blow-in from Inishmaan.
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His increasing closeness to the family, and to the children’s mother especially, is a source of fury, frustration and powerlessness to Michael, who vows to exact a terrible, and permanent, revenge on the interloper.
On to this relatively streamlined narrative skeleton, Farrell painstakingly accretes layers of visceral thought and feeling. The language itself is confronting: Michael’s voice is articulate, but has the grammatical and syntactic misfirings of childhood, in which bewildering impressions of the outside world are punctuated by borrowings from adult instructions and warnings: “You have to be careful with Lough Derravaragh – three men went fishing in a boat and the water was still, and flat like a pancake, but out of nowhere it tipped them in and the lake froze over quick in a flash and cut their heads off. Then it went straight back to normal, but all three men were without their heads.”
Jerry/Gearóid is intent on becoming the family’s protector, but Michael can see him only as tormentor, and secretly envisages ways to be rid of him: writing stories of destruction that he believes might magically become true, or more directly mixing rat poison into the herbal remedies that his mother makes for Jerry. What the readers can see from beyond the boy’s bitter interior reckonings is his displaced pain and fear, the lingering sense of precarity that frequent upheaval and dispossession have provoked, and the terror that they will happen again.
We see, too, in sporadic italicised sections, the view from inside Jerry’s head: the patient and often thwarted attempts to win the child’s confidence, and the sense of fellow-feeling, only dimly acknowledged, with a creature so unsure of his rights over the territory around him. And, despite only the fleeting presence of concrete historical and cultural references, there is an implicit understanding that these individual lacks and losses are felt on a societal level as well.
Powering this novel’s engine is Farrell’s exceptional sense of pacing: as Michael stews in rage and vengeance, the calendar introduces us to a succession of weathers, rhythms and natural phenomena, so that we are caught between a feeling of beauty and abundance while simultaneously fearing where this intense family drama will lead us.
There are tiny, perfectly judged interventions from a quasi Greek-chorus – Mrs Lynch, a neighbour slowly orchestrating events to everyone’s benefit while lamenting the breakdown of her own family; a schoolteacher urging Michael’s creative storytelling onward; and B herself, sternly instructing him to manage his emotions and to think of others. And in the middle of it, a small child, angry and terrified, clinging on to the hope that nothing will change while everything does.
