The American lady sitting near to me in a restaurant spotted me reading the last pages of Scarlet Feather, and gasped: "Is that a new Maeve Binchy?" Yes, I said, it would be published shortly. "Oh, I just can't wait!" she exclaimed. "Just can't wait!" I thought it might be too distressing to break the news that this would be the last Maeve Binchy novel, since she has announced her retirement from writing.
Maeve Binchy's enormous readership - she is the third most popular author in the world, living or dead - will know what to expect from a new Binchy oeuvre: the interplay of relationships within a community context and the gradual emergence of character through the unfolding of events. The words "Irish warmth " are repeatedly used in reference to a Binchy novel and I believe that this keynote of authorial warmth is one of the compelling aspects of her writing.
That Binchy is a consummate story-teller who involves the reader in the world she creates is well established, and well recognised by her public: what is as yet less appreciated is that Maeve Binchy's work is very often also a serious and accurate social text, reflecting changes in culture and values occurring in Ireland over the past 20 years. Tara Road, which sold a million copies in its first paperback printing, was, at one level, an engaging story about two women who exchange homes for a summer, and thus change their lives: it could also be read as a well-observed thesis on rising houseprices in the Dublin area over the 1980s and 1990s, and an illuminating commentary on the impact of the divorce referendum of 1995. In this respect, Binchy is a Dickens: she writes about the dilemmas of human beings with a backdrop which describes the manners and morals of a society.
Scarlet Feather has a similarly meaningful social theme, altogether relevant to an Ireland of burgeoning prosperity: it is about two individuals, Cathy Scarlet and Tom Feather, friends rather than lovers, who start a catering business together. As she sets about launching her business, Cathy reflects upon her potential market: "There would be birthdays, graduations, weddings, anniversaries, reunions - even funerals. People no longer thought that caterers were the preserve of only the rich and famous." Women had "given up the nonsensical superwoman image of pretending that they had cooked everything themselves, while holding down a job, looking after their children and running a home. Nowadays, you were considered intelligent to be able to find someone else to take part of a compartment of your life". Here is a service society, in which business is expanded by segmenting different compartments of living.
Cathy is married to a human rights lawyer, Neil - a tremendous prig who cannot, it seems, enter a Chinese restaurant without wondering if the kitchen staff is unionised - and Tom is living with a pretty girl given to wearing skimpy frocks who longs to be a model. Tom is also something of a prig: men in Binchy stories tend either to be inadequate (we have here a deserting dad, a deadbeat dad, a weak father-in-law and a ne'erdo-well cousin among the cast) or Politically Correct stuffed shirts. Tom is horrified when a client offers to remit cash in settlement for a bill, to avoid taxation. He waxes unbearably prim.
As they build up their Scarlet-Feather business, the interlocked fretwork of their lives, their families and friends emerges, and their setbacks, conflicts, triumphs and disasters are narrated, all with a watchful eye for social detail. The changing place of food in Irish society is finely catalogued: the humble sausage is still acceptable, but now it is accessorised with redcurrant and honey glaze; a plumber's wife may now, with training, appreciate the difference between choux and filo pastry, or discuss quails eggs and langoustines. Even more closely observed are the changing values in religious sensibilities: Catholic Ireland resides, still, among an older proletariat, whose homes, laden with statues, may be called "Fatima", (while the upwardly mobile, and more secularised, will have homes called "Oaklands" and "Waterview").
A very significant theme in this, as in all Binchy works, is how women order their lives, and how they deal with the conflict that arises from reconciling those different compartments of their lives. If a woman has a rising business, and her husband wants to take a job abroad, what to do? Even more problematic, how does she deal with a pregnancy that she - and her husband - had not planned? In an extraordinarily clever passage, Maeve Binchy dissects the tension that arises between a political commitment to liberal abortion, and an instinctive feeling against it. "It just wasn't a theory any more, not a case or a Constitutional amendment. It was her baby."
In the end, after a series of setbacks and painful experiences, things work out in an interesting way for Tom and Cathy: the Binchy public will not be disappointed at storyline or resolution. We must hope, too, that the Binchy retirement project leaves the possibility open for many more revivals in the coming times.
Mary Kenny's Goodbye to Catholic Ireland is being re-published in a new edition in September. She writes for Independent Newspapers