How carelessly we drop them, the threads of love that hold us together, in relationships, families, communities. And how remarkable are those who know how to hold on, how to care for those at risk, how to keep a person company. The disappearance of Mags Nelsen provokes in her adult children not just the dread that she is irrevocably lost, but also the almost equal fear that she may be found and that they will have to pull together to look after her better thereafter. This fine novel by Henrietta McKervey takes the twin nightmares of dementia and disappearance and lights up all the many, many ways in we lose each other all the time.
The poet Michael Longley spoke and read some poems at a launch I organised a couple of weeks ago for an organisation called the Wave Trauma Centre in Belfast. He read his elegy for the ice-cream man on the Lisburn Road and through his artistry made a man who might have been forgotten by everyone but his family into someone in whom all of our humanity resided, his murder an attack on all of us. Then he started to tell a story and couldn’t recall someone’s name. “I’m having one of those...,” he stopped, struggling. “I can’t even remember what you call them…senior moments.” He smiled and we laughed.
The launch was for a series of recorded interviews with people who had lost a parent or parents to the violence of the Northern Irish conflict. They had told me their stories so that the person who had been killed would not be forgotten, that their particular loveliness and goodness would be remembered and praised. The way a mother liked to hug, and it had to be a tight hug. The cakes she baked for family gatherings. The young Dad whose children knew how much he was looking forward to dancing at his sister’s wedding. The father that brought his son out to the bog to gather in turf to keep the family warm through the winter, whose now untouched tools are still kept in the shed. As Longley asserts in one of the poems he read: “All of these people were civilised.”
Mags is lonely before she is lost. She is angrily aware of the way ageing women become invisible – and appreciates the attentions of those who by small gestures show they recognise her, who notice a new hat. In Anita she has a daughter who is dutiful but so distracted by her own sense of displacement and grief that she is more furious than compassionate. Raymond she does not like to dwell on, because she does not like to admit he is a disappointment to her. He meanwhile dwells mostly on the prospect of his next pint. When he finally tells Jean, the woman he lives with in Cork, that when his mother is found he will come back to Dublin to take care of her, he neglects to say anything about what this will mean to her, though he sees by her look that he should. Elin, exiled by the rage of her sister, rarely comes home and when she does is plunged into painful memories that do not allow for much nurturing of her mother.
This is a family abandoned, and a family bereaved. The losses sustained already are huge. Mags has had the generosity of spirit to move on and to take a kindly interest in the lives of others. The list on which she notes that she has to get a birthday card for Jean proves to be a Hansel and Gretel crumb in the search for her. But her children are stunted by their losses. However, while the new tragedy looming over the Jansen family is destructive, it also brings insight and opens up possibilities for change. Raymond, humbled by the realisation that the young woman who runs the flower shop pays more attention to his mother than he does, sees Elin needlessly pushing her loving partner away and tries to stop her. Anita’s inarticulate husband makes a passionate declaration of his feelings. She reaches out and they hold each other on a clifftop path and cry messy, necessary tears.
Talking about her novel, Henrietta has commented that she is fascinated, and horrified, by the way that even a brief disappearance opens up a huge gap in a family, and how no matter how much is poured into the gap, it never entirely closes up again. I’ve seen this in families in which the disappearance widens to become the abiding obsession, when life narrows to becoming a perpetual search. I remember listening to the mother of one of those known in the North as “the Disappeared” as she talked about her lovely lost boy while quite harshly criticising his by then middle-aged siblings. They had suffered terribly too. They were weary but I could see that they did all they could to support this angry old lady who they loved and had lost to grief. “She’s not the woman she used to be,” one of them told me.
For a young writer, Henrietta is strikingly wise. She has a clear-eyed compassion for her characters. She writes dazzlingly well and with a wonderful lightness of touch – her descriptions of colours are delightful, her capturing of fleeting emotions exact and devastating. This is a novel about love, and how we need it and how we fear it. It is about home and family and community and society. It goes where its title suggests it will go – to the heart of everything.
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 tonight, Thursday, May 26th, at 7.30pm, and published here on May 31st.
