Clara is, as she says with heavy irony, "post-operative". Her pain is obviously emotional as well as physical, and she seems to be in the process of assessing her situation. Quickly and with much barbed humour - "by the way you may have noticed that I am having problems with some of the upper-case Is. I'm sorry about this. It has happened to me since my operation and I think has something to do with loss of self-esteem." - she supplies the details of her life, including her mother's ritual of making jam and baking. "I am by way of being the cosmopolitan one in the family."
Yet she is also the one who, when not abroad, lives in Dalkey, around the corner from her mother's house. Not by choice: an aunt left her a small cottage. Clara writes reviews and articles, and travels about, lecturing on Irish literature, "not Synge, Yeats or Joyce". Instead she concentrates on Elizabeth Bowen, John McGahern, Edna O'Brien. "I stick with prose writers: talking about poetry to an ocean of undergraduates makes me feel ill in the head."
She also lectures on Francis Stuart and Sean O'Faolain - which is interesting. What a shame, though, that their last names are incorrectly spelt - surely "Stewart " should have caught someone's eye at the proof-reading stages. Clara is defiantly living in her head, leaving her body to go through the motions of being alive. From the outset her narrative voice engages as forcefully as does that of Constance in another of Johnston's finest books, The Christmas Tree (1981). At present Clara's world consists of her kindly mother, her caring doctor and an ongoing dialogue with herself. Into this circle come a man and his dog. His arrival is by chance, as, while walking on Killiney Hill, he notices Clara who appears to be walking dangerously near the edge. His interest does not go beyond this, as he has problems of his own.
Their exchanges are brief. At the next encounter Clara, in her blunt, awkward way, decides this strange man from the North of Ireland should move into her house. It is no romance - more like a mutual salvage operation - and Clara makes clear she has no interest in hearing about the North.
Without tears or melodrama (though with a great deal of anger) Johnston's 12th novel juxtaposes two bruised characters and allows each to tell their own story. As a writer she is as blunt as she is subtle. Clara's sense of hurt comes seeping out beneath her outspoken comments, while Lar's is more explosive. Despite the sharpness of the wary conversations between Clara and Lar, Johnston is not content to allow the narrative to become a play-within-a-book. Her attention to detail confers a texture of lives going on, albeit at a remove. Just as Clara's concerned mother remains on the alert, so are Lar's parents aware of the losses endured and the continual damage being suffered by him through his anger.
The Gingerbread Woman is characteristic as well as untypical of Johnston, similar yet different. She knows her territory. Probably the most consistently under-celebrated of Irish writers, her genius lies in her calm intelligence and her instinctive feel for the way an individual will act in an extreme emotional crisis. Most interestingly she observes the shifts in emotions and the layers of response. Johnston is not afraid of making Lar unsympathetic. His obsession with his grief and his casual rudeness prove disturbing enough to Clara's mother that she takes action.
The strongest sequences in the narrative are those in which Clara steps back from the abrasive public self she has perfected in order to survive, and surveys her real self. That former self is the person residing at the centre of the betrayal that has cost her far more than her trust. Clara is a creature of large gestures and it is fitting that her drama should be dramatic, even cruel and constructed on lies. Betrayed by love, and "the bubble of unreality in which I had been living", she also feels betrayed by herself. In order to purge herself of this, or at least understand it, she sets out to write a novel. Her chronicling of the love affair reads as a confession of folly. Her lover quickly reveals his intention of conducting their entire relationship within the walls of her apartment, leaving his real life undisturbed. The signals are obvious. Clara ignores them.
As the writer who took the Irish Big House novel out of the countryside and decaying privilege, and into the narrower comfort of Dalkey and Killiney, Jennifer Johnston has always demonstrated an exact understanding of the cultural nuances of Irish life as well as the perceptions, even textures, that go into the business of being Irish. Few Irish writers have pursued these questions so intently. Aside from all this, The Gingerbread Woman reiterates she remains, as ever, a shrewd, canny storyteller who understands human error.
Eileen Battersby is the Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
