“He thought of the city, all the labour in its wards: the calico manufacturers, coopers, cotton spinners, the coal and coke merchants, the importers of ebonite and earthenware, men who sold gauge glass and German silver, makers of hinges and screws, dynamos, driving rope. The hosts of clerks and cashiers, wire workers, wood carvers, spinners of worsted yarn. All living now in this smoke-racked city, lives indivisible from their labour; scraping, cutting, scratching, hammering at their meagre or immodest livings, for it seemed only to allow the two.”
The city in question is Manchester, 10 years before the turn of the 20th century, industrial and industrious, a period of great social change, and fast money for certain classes. In his debut novel, Adam O’Riordan brinngs this world to life through masterful period detail and dexterous description that quickly immerse the reader in the past.
Looming over The Falling Thread’s narrative – indeed, bookending the main story – is a snapshot of life as a soldier in the first World War. How Britain’s fortunes as an industrial nation gave way to the horrors of that war creates a certain tension in a book that otherwise lacks in shape.
O’Riordan, an acclaimed poet and short story writer, is more interested in depiction and characterisation than plot. The book comprises of numerous scenes and sections that move forward months, sometimes years at a time, spanning 1890 to 1913. An omniscient narrator, while appropriate for setting and era, contributes to these structural issues, but if the narrative arc itself is problematic, O’Riordan more than makes up for it with the vibrancy of his individual scenes.
The society of the time (the Victorian era giving way to the Edwardian) and the lives of this aloof upper-class family come through in colour
Three members of the upper-class Wright family are the book’s central characters. Eldest son Charles is a brilliant and ambitious student at Cambridge – until he woos the family’s governess over the course of a listless summer, with predictable and life-altering consequences for all involved.
What is less predictable is Charles’s memorable reaction to the pregnancy: “He could swim until England was reduced to a line on the horizon. In the sea, sink to the bottom, his flesh picked apart by soft-mouthed creatures, as the tides moved above him.” Unluckily for Charles, his parents force him to do the honourable thing.
Through the character of Hettie, the governess, O’Riordan gives us a window into the treatment of unmarried mothers at the time. Hurried away to an infirmary, where a creepy doctor tells her she’s lucky that he’s not applying leeches to her body, Hettie is left waiting for someone to save her. Charles and his wider family prove somewhat able for the task, but Hettie’s trajectory is a tragic one, and in many ways the beating heart of the book.
Equally well rendered are Charles’s sisters, activist Tabitha and artist Eloise. The latter’s louche world of artists and their patrons makes for entertaining reading in later parts of the book. Tabitha, meanwhile, embarks on a mission of gender and class reform. From secret suffragette meetings to farthing bundles, “which involved concerned citizens sending impoverished children dolls made from old newspaper and kindling”, the research is impeccable and seamlessly incorporated.
The society of the time (the Victorian era giving way to the Edwardian) and the lives of this aloof upper-class family come through in colour: the button-back bergère in the study, the ammonites on the mantelpiece, the infirmary’s pitted stonework, coarsened with soot. O’Riordan has fun with the stiff-upper-lip attitude of the Wrights. In dialogue there are frequent flashes of dry wit and bittersweet bickering.
After quietly stitching together an entire tapestry of his characters' lives, O'Riordan unpicks his work and allows each family member to go their own way
His side characters are also compelling, from Eloise’s unrequited love for artist George, to the married actor that Charles foolishly chases around Europe: “She told him a sequence of conflicting stories – she was the eldest daughter of a tea planter in Assam, or an orphan raised by Ursuline nuns, or the tenth child of an analytical chemist.”
The novel’s considered portrait of upper-class lives brings a Jamesian quality to this debut. From Manchester, O’Riordan is the author of two poetry collections – In the Flesh, which won a Somerset Maugham Award in 2011, and A Herring Famine – and a short story collection, The Burning Ground. His prose is assured, elegant and evocative, with many an unusual turn of phrase, particularly when describing nature: “Leaf matter scored a dark line around the skylight.” Elsewhere, “the rain had left dark marks along the ribbon on the bonnet. There was damp confetti in the gaps between the landaulet’s seats.”
The Falling Thread doesn’t so much finish as unravel. After quietly stitching together an entire tapestry of his characters’ lives, O’Riordan unpicks his work and allows each family member to go their own way. In keeping with the tone of the book, it is an abrupt ending of sorts, one that leaves the reader wanting more.
