Fiction:A critique of the hysterical prejudices surrounding the issue of mental illness in Irish society is at the forefront of Billy, Come Home. The eighth novel by Mary Rose Callaghan, it is a principled piece of work that seeks to give voice to the realities of lives often distorted by myth, fear and societal ignorance.
Billy, Come Hometells the story of Billy Reilly, a schizophrenic who is wrongly accused of the murder of a Traveller girl, an accusation directly fuelled by prejudices relating to his illness. The narrative is told from the perspective of his sister Angie, who supports him throughout and confronts the intolerant wrath of a society that refuses to see the truth, even when the bare facts of Billy's innocence are made clear. Faced with this bigotry and his concurrent fear of institutionalisation, Billy disappears, hence the "come home" of the title, Angie's pleading voice to her missing brother.
The novel takes this disappearance as its starting point and moves on to skilfully interweave the events relating to Billy's accusation with his childhood and adolescent past. It is in this way that Callaghan blends her critique of public responses to mental illness with that of the private familial space, through an account of the inability of Billy's own parents to respectfully acknowledge his difference. The need to respect difference, treated negatively by a society that positions itself in terms of the "standard" or the "norm", constitutes the central theme of the novel. This theme is addressed not only with respect to mental illness, but also in relation to other groups in contemporary Irish life, such as the Travelling community and the homeless. Billy, Come Homecritiques society's disregard for such differences and outlines the devastating neglect that such disregard engenders. The motif of "home", signalled in the title and consistently drawn upon in the novel as a whole, compounds Callaghan's critique all the more. What is called for is a re-evaluation of the notion of home and belonging, so that differences and different forms of living are included rather than excluded, respected rather than subtly ignored.
At times the narrative structure of Billy, Come Homecan seem overly simplistic, with Angie's voice speaking too directly to the reader, too focused on making its ethical point. However, such stylistic simplicity is the fundamental point. This thoughtful and poignant novel places ethics rather than aesthetics at its core - its motivation is to challenge prejudices and create a society respectful of difference. For Billy to come home he needs a home to come back to. This is the message of the novel, a message that (through narrative style) is made very simply clear.
Claire Bracken teaches Irish literature at University College Dublin and is researching contemporary Irish women's writing and film
Billy, Come Home By Mary Rose Callaghan Brandon, 201 pp. €14.99