FICTION: I Rememberby Noelle Harrison, Macmillan, 259pp. £11.99 A Dance in Timeby Orna Ross, Penguin Ireland, 606pp. €14.99
IT SEEMS INCREASINGLY popular to tell stories from different time points, to jump between future, present and past, rather than let a story unfold chronologically. A Dance in Time, by Orna Ross, and I Remember, by Noelle Harrison, are two very different novels with one thing in common: they both, to use Orna Ross's title, dance in time.
I Remember alternates between the present, past and distant past of one character while A Dance in Time is ambitious in following, chronologically, the lives of two historical figures, and, randomly, the lives of two contemporary fictional characters.
I Remember is the story of 18-year-old Barbara, an ingénue from Sligo who trades a life marred by tragedy for a new start, as an au pair, with an intimidating family in London. Olivia Finch is French, beautiful and neurotic. Her husband, John, is affable, sad and appeasing. Their daughter Matilda is ill. Only one person knows why. And that is the person who is making her ill. The story moves to the Camargue in France, where Barbara finds first love. It cannot be enjoyed. Matilda is at risk. Barbara does not know who to trust.
I Remember is at its absolute best when Barbara arrives, fresh off the boat, at the Finches' imposing London residence. Noelle Harrison makes sure we are right there with her, feeling the heat of her zipped-up red PVC jacket that "in Sligo, seemed the height of fashion" but now feels cheap. We follow her on a frenzied hunt through the unfamiliar house for a basin to catch the vomit of a child who doesn't want an au pair, especially not one with a red coat and hair to match. Barbara wants to go home. We're right behind her. But so too is her past. She can't go back, only forward. Noelle Harrison can write beautifully and bring us wherever she wants us - to an unfamiliar and claustrophobic London household, a stifling attic in the south of France, a house in flames.
The story of Barbara the au pair forms the bulk of the narrative, with two other strands weaving in and out - her childhood tragedy and her unfulfilled present. I Remember is easy reading, with all three strands tying together - perhaps a little too neatly in the end.
A Dance In Time by Orna Ross follows the stories of contemporary characters Izzy Mulcahy and her daughter, Star. It also traces the lives of Maud Gonne, her daughter, Iseult, and a man very much present in both lives, WB Yeats. The book opens with Izzy facing a murder charge for the death of her terminally ill father, a brutal man and former Garda sergeant whose life crossed, not in a major way, with that of Iseult Gonne. Rather than deal with the reality she faces, Izzy loses herself in literature, specifically in the lives of the Gonnes, to whom she feels connected. She repeatedly flashes back to her own childhood, and that of Star, a rebellious spirit who holds huge resentment towards her mother.
What is beautifully realised is the lead up to and the arrest of Izzy in small-town Ireland. What could have been overdramatic reads as very real. Like Harrison, Ross is an evocative writer, bringing us from modern-day Ireland to California during and post the hippie era, right back to France at the beginning of the last century, to the first World War. Themes overlap between the modern story and the historical; strained relationships between mother and daughter, child abuse, artistic struggle, promiscuity, regret. Because it dances so much in time over the course of 600 pages, this is not a book to dip in and out of. Its pace is that of a slow waltz, rather than a foxtrot, as the story dips in and out of the lives of characters that could never be accused of being ordinary.
Denise Deegan is a writer. Her latest novel, Do You Want What I Want?, is out now in paperback