Reflecting on the books she read as a teenager, Ruth, the grown-up daughter in Clare Boylan's moving and funny novel, observes "Nobody ever wrote about marriage itself. Once the summit of romance had been achieved, the ropes were withdrawn and the people were marooned there." Few novels have looked into the heart of a long-term marriage with such clear-eyed compassion as Beloved Stranger. Dick and Lily Butler enjoy - endure? - a traditional marriage held together by tenderness, tyranny and a multitude of compromises, most of them on Lily's part. In the familiar role of parent/child peacekeeper, her warning to Ruth has always been "Your father will go mad". And then, in old age, he does: Dick's manic depression both renews the marriage and gives Lily a chance of escape as Ruth looks on, bewildered as adult children so often are, by the strength of the bond between two people who have lived all their adult lives as halves of a whole. Clare Boylan describes her territory, a Dublin suburbia in which people keep their troubles indoors, with the same kind of wry precision that she brings to her analysis of old-fashioned married love.
