This story is set in Ballmully, near Cookstown, mid-Ulster, 1916. It centres on Felix Campbell, a batchelor, 43 years of age, diligently farming his 90 acres, who takes The Times to follow the progress of the Great War and feels himself better informed than anyone he encounters. Into his life saunters (she never walks) Sarah-Ann O'Malloran, widow of Frank Duffy who has been killed at the Front, and mother to 14 children.
She is a big woman, weighing 13 pounds at birth, with long dark hair down her back and a swirling floral skirt stretched over wide hips. Her spirit is defined by her ancestry, her people "were susceptible to whimsy and a certain non-conformity". Where everybody else painted the doors of their cottages infrequently and achieved a soft, weather-beaten, inconspicuous look, the O'Mallorans painted theirs purple.
Felix is transfixed and the narrative follows their love story. Felix risking all in contradiction to his maxim "that the extent to which a man's life has value and joy is the degree to which he is free from responsibility and convention", which can only be achieved in isolation and independence. Sarah-Ann is portrayed as a woman "who flashed colour and light and moved free like the world was without boundary". In contrast to them and their lucky chance - or exercise in free will - are individuals gone feral or sour in isolation and self-neglect.
Within this rural universe the conflicts of personalities mirror the conflicts of all worlds. Over all the individual lives is the crust connecting the Catholics and the Protestants of various hues. They are intensely curious about their respective tribalisms, and affectionately spiteful. The idiosyncratic structure of the novel, narrating through detached vignettes of characters and events, makes it difficult to comprehend at first.
The style can be obscure in some of the introspective passages and the author hampers herself with a tiresome and ponderous Greek chorus of yokels.
But her comic touch otherwise improves and her descriptive powers are striking, achieving fine, sustained writing at the last. Virago, the publishers, have provided an excellent product, with beautiful endpapers and quality paper and font.
Olivia Hamilton is a teacher and editor