Fiction: This is an ambitious novel about the state of Ireland. Specifically, it has to do with the need to heal breaches and divisions, wounds and lacerations.Splits in inheritance, allegiance and personality come into it, as well as cuts in the skin which respond to the power of Kerry Hardie's protagonist, Ellen, a healer in spite of herself.
She is also clairvoyant, which also embarrasses and agitates her. Ellen is from the North, a Derry Presbyterian and unlikely possessor of a transcendental gift. Once married to Robbie, a Belfast electrician of small finesse, she has run away with Liam, a Southern Catholic and stonemason, fetched up in Kilkenny, given birth to a boy and a girl, made a friend of an ex-nun, resisted applying her healing capabilities, and failed to mend a fraught relationship with her schoolteacher mother (a bitter Presbyterian if ever there was one).
The Bird Woman is Ellen's story, and within its fine and meaningful framework it's essentially an account of domestic life, with plenty of sex, scope for betrayal and misunderstanding, family relations, clashes of culture and viewpoint. If you grew up in Derry, it's hard to shake off assumptions about Southern Ireland - just as, for Southerners, a strong tendency exists to lump the whole of the North, Protestant and Catholic together in one incorrigible cluster. Dispensing with prejudice requires an effort, indeed, but it's an effort that has to be made, if any healing, compromise or regeneration is ever to take place. Clairvoyance in this context is just a metaphor for clear seeing.
Kerry Hardie is a poet, and she brings a poet's eye for detail to her descriptions of nature and locality: "Spring after spring we walked up the road and I showed them the grey paired leaves of the woodbine; the comely, red-stemmed herb robert; the ferny, singing green growth of the cow parsley . . . They saw mallard duck in the rushes, the blue flash of a kingfisher, the herons standing about in the shallows, stoic and unsociable, beings from some other realm". Such evocations make a series of leisurely interludes in a narrative much taken up with questions of integrity and identity.
Sometimes these matters are terrifically over-elaborated, just as a Northern vernacular gets too obtrusive a showing every now and then: "many's the time"; "there wasn't a sinner". On the whole, though, you are carried along by the flow of the story and its implications - before the entire undertaking is vitiated by a glossary filled with absurd inclusions. The phrase "ward sister" is defined for us, if you please ("Nurse in charge of a ward in a hospital"), along with "ring road" and the expression "Lady Muck".
We are told that "kitted' means "dressed" and that "naff" equals "lacking sophistication". Puzzled by "rota"? Help is at hand - it's "a list of people who will take turns at some task". And there's more. For a book whose drift is to point to the dangers in making assumptions about attitudes and aptitudes, to assume such a lack of basic knowledge on the part of readers can only strike us as a serious misjudgment.
Patricia Craig is a critic, biographer and anthologist. Her Ulster Anthology will be published by Blackstaff in the autumn
The Bird Woman By Kerry Hardie Harper Collins, 371pp. £14.99