Popular fiction written and read mostly by women is usually set in an intensely realised world where detail is everything: the scent of jasmine on the evening air, rapid sunsets that plunge characters into darkness in warm southerly climates, the swirl of powerful emotions when felt for the first time.
Catherine Dunne's 10th novel is part of this tradition. Set in various regions of Spain and in Cyprus, The Years That Followed is not short on minute and memorable description. Dunne's afterword confirms recent travels to authenticate locales for her book. She even imbeds one of her Spanish guides into the text by giving her name to a minor character. This isn't, then, a book penned by a solitary writer in a garret.
Events occur with an eye to paralleling and twinning, as the life stories of two very different women converge.
First there is Calista, an affluent Irish girl with a Spanish mother, who becomes the pregnant bride of a Greek-Cypriot shipping magnate’s youngest son. Next is Pilar, the only daughter of impoverished farmers in Extremadura. Pilar escapes to Madrid and acquires financial independence, only to be seduced and impregnated by the magnate himself. Both young women had strained home lives they succeed in escaping, only to find themselves at times vulnerable and alone.
When Maeve Binchy created young women eager for new lives, they were not always wise. They made mistakes, and they learned from them. Such characters also existed in a realistic social context. A girl who falls hopelessly for a handsome stranger or a married man were provided with girlfriends or office mates or neighbours who at least attempted to confront the starry-eyed victim with a few home truths.
Dunne isn’t as thoughtful as Binchy in this regard. The beautiful teenaged Calista, even before her shotgun wedding and removal to her husband’s family compound in Cyprus, exists nearly in a vacuum. Apart from her parents and twin brother and a canny housemaid, Calista seems to interact with no one.
Similarly the less pampered, no-nonsense Pilar makes no real friends in Madrid, instead taking all her cues from a benign mystery man from her mother’s village. Neither character has a cohort, and in this empty space Dunne’s plotting is far easier to construct.
The action of the novel is set in 1989, but much of the backstory is told in interleaved chapters that begin in the 1960s, when both women first encountered the Demitriades family, and inches forward in time. The gap between the past and present is artfully signalled by references to changes in fashions, reading matter and social trends.
Calista's going-away costume is a Jackie Kennedy suit with pillbox hat. She reads Iris Murdoch's The Unicorn. Women's lib rears its controversial head. Parallel political upheavals of the 1970s provide common ground – the Troubles in Northern Ireland and, pivotally, the Greek-Cypriot crisis.
Mythological references
Apart from its international ambiance,
The Years That Followed
is punctuated with Homeric references and feint echoes from Greek mythology. Calista’s second child, a son, is named Omiros. We are also reminded that the love affair between Aphrodite and Adonis ended on Cyprus, when a jealous goddess sent a boar to gore the beautiful youth.
This primal struggle between love and death plays itself out over and over in Dunne’s pages. Never short on violence, the novel is essentially a revenge tragedy. We know that Calista’s handsome husband is dead nearly from the start, but why and how? By whose hand or whose order? It will take the author 300 pages to divulge.
In the meantime, several well-drawn secondary characters emerge to pique our interest. Both young women have disappointed mothers thwarted by marriage, and in this they are joined by the mother of the Demitriades brood. What all three women of this earlier generation share is a crippling awareness of social class and gender inequity, and control over their adult children.
In the later timeframe, the local tavern owners, young Jaime and Rosa, and Jaime’s amiable parents, stand in vivid contrast to all the privileged and damaged folk in this generational story – they actually like their work and each other, and seem to enjoy life. We meet them through Calista, who, after more tragedy and loss, has unknowingly settled in a palatial home in Pilar’s home village.
Thus the wheel of fate turns again. Dunne ties up the skeins connecting two women whose life choices draw them into the same orbit of volatile secrecy and vengeful murder.
Christina Hunt Mahony is a senior research fellow in the School of English, Trinity College
