`The Kingstons were Poleites. Poleites didn't have a church, they weren't allowed to listen to music; no gramophones, no radios, no televisions. They couldn't go to the cinema and mix with crowds. No pubs. They couldn't go to a dancehall to slide their feet over a slippery floor. They weren't allowed medical treatment. No drinking, no dancing, no doctors." In the overwhelmingly Catholic Irish literary tradition, few writers have bothered to explore the drab, dusty world of extremist Protestant sects; how could their joyless prohibitions compare, for sheer drama, with the colourful rituals and exuberant defrockings of the Mass market?
If Martina Evans's third novel did nothing else, then, it would serve as a valuable social documentary. It does more than that, though: a lot more. With a deftness that belies its structural complexity, it floats beneath the callused surface of rural life past and present to explore themes of loss, vulnerability, and the stubbornness of dogmatic beliefs. It creates a small but significant canvas-full of memorable characters. And it imprints itself on the reader's mind with the sort of surefooted, yet subtly unfamiliar stamp - this is us, but can it really be us? - that marks a true original.
Sixty-year-old Beulah Kingston has been struck down by arthritis and forced, against the rules of her religion, to go into hospital for X-rays. A solitary woman with a reputation for toughness, she married young, but her life has been marred by tragedy; the death of her young son in an accident, the death of her husband, barely more than a boy himself, in circumstances which still, half a century later, remain mysterious. Her daughter has left long since and made a new life in the city. But the unexpected arrival of her grand-daughter, spirited, energetic and keen to find out about her Poleite past, prompts a re-examination of Beulah's hard life and the secret passion at its soft centre.
Told thus, the story may sound somewhat predictable; in the hands of the skilful Evans, however, it is anything but. It weaves from one time-frame to another with warmth, wit and commendable lucidity; and if I had any lingering doubts as to its relevance to contemporary Irish life, the discovery of a recent report in this newspaper of a child in Co Waterford being taken into care when his parents refused to allow him a blood transfusion on religious grounds dispelled them instantly.
Arminta Wallace is an Irish Times staff journalist
