Secrets. Rivalries. Resentments. Tenderness. It could probably be said that every family story has these elements, buried somewhere beneath an apparently functional surface. And that’s why I am fairly confident that The Heart of Everything, a new novel about a family hit by an alarming crisis, is likely to kick off some rousing book club confessions and debates.
This is Dubliner Henrietta McKervey’s second novel. Her first, What Becomes of Us, is a historical read whose artfully crafted descriptions I found very engaging. This is a more contemporary novel that, for me, draws the reader in more rapidly and powerfully.
A bit of a spoiler alert here: the novel kicks off from the perspective of 69-year-old Mags Jensen, the matriarchal character whose subsequent sudden disappearance will drive the narrative.
It quickly becomes clear that Mags is somewhat muddled in her thinking. At home alone and in the early stages of dementia, she is making lists to trigger her memory, as she’s been instructed to do by “Mr Whatsisname”. She is supposed to detail the events of her days, so she can have a record of them. But then memories from the past impinge on her planning process for the day ahead. She thinks of her children, of the daughters who no longer speak to one another, the son who “doesn’t seem that bothered with any of them”.
She remembers the recent moment when a consultant asked what age she was, and how, for less than a minute, “she didn’t even understand what he meant by it, what sort of information he was trying to get out of her”.
Her brain reminds her of an old filing cabinet; she is desperately yanking open different drawers to find the right piece of paper. But the answer doesn’t come. And there is an old woman in the mirror that she barely recognises.
Finally she is ready. She locks the front door behind her and “takes herself away”, leaving behind a mystery and a void that her adult children will struggle to handle.
And so the novel really begins. With their mother abruptly missing, Mags’ three children – Anita, Raymond and Elin – are reluctantly forced to join forces and search for her.
While their dilemma is very particular – the hunt for a physically missing parent is something few of us will ever experience, with luck – the quality of their interactions and the scale of their difficulties in communication will be all too painfully familiar to anyone who has ever struggled to get on with a grown-up sibling.
Anita is the organised type. She has taken on the day-to-day care of her mother, and is by turns solicitous and exasperated in that role. It’s not like she doesn’t have anything else to deal with – she has a husband, a nice house, a pair of teenage twins and a little boy called Cuan who is busy with school and playdates. And she is also nursing an intense heartbreak, whose terrible cause is revealed at a later date. Busy and self-important, her first reaction, when she realises her mother is missing, is to be infuriated at the disruption to her own day.
Then there’s Raymond, the brother who has fled to Cork and who is living out his life without any discernible commitment or interest in it. He used to star in a TV soap and now he’s a heavy-drinking librarian whose affection for his mother has “calcified into an uneasy-but-dedicated admiration”.
McKervey is resolutely unsentimental when it comes to dissecting her characters’ feelings and motivations. Raymond’s love for his mother, she says at an early stage, “lies somewhere above his respect for indie music, below his love for Guinness and Krzystof Kieslowski films”. The reader quickly gets the picture.
When Anita phones him to say their Mum hasn’t come home as planned, he assumes she is making a fuss out of nothing.
“She can really push my buttons,” he complains to his colleague once his sister is off the phone.
“Of course she can Raymond,” comes the wise reply. “She’s your big sister. She installed your buttons.”
The last sibling is Elin, a waifish children’s books illustrator who has escaped a difficult breach with Anita by forging a life in Scotland with the upbeat Marty, from whom she has hidden whole chunks of her own history.
Eventually it’s Raymond who calls Elin to tell her about their mother. “We don’t know where she is,” he says, a sentence Elin needs to have repeated several times over before she can take it in.
And when Elin finally joins her siblings, and the increasingly frantic search for their mother kicks off in earnest, the most painful family fissures are exposed.
And still we wonder through it all – what on earth has happened to Mags?
It would be unfair to reveal this book’s deepest secrets to anyone who hasn’t read it yet. I can only say it’s worth the reader’s while to persevere.
Is this a good Book Club book? I would say yes. There are themes here that many people will relate to. It’s a sad tale but there’s a wry humour in evidence throughout that rescues it from tipping into mawkishness. And there’s a richness of language that any lover of words will relish.
The Heart of Everything pulls off quite a tricky feat in literature. It is both a warm and perceptive book about tricky family relationships and a satisfyingly tight mystery tale.
I reckon Henrietta McKervey’s next book will be one to watch.
The Heart of Everything by Henrietta McKervey is published by Hachette Books Ireland, £12.99. Hodges Figgis offers a 10 per cent discount on Irish Times Book Club titles. Throughout May, we will publish a series of articles by the author, fellow writers and readers exploring the novel, culminating in a podcast to be recorded at the Irish Writers Centre on Thursday, May 26th, at 7.30pm, and published here on May 31st.
