Irish Fiction: This is a modern novel in which characters communicate and if they cannot communicate they feel it's worth trying to do so.
It is set in the isolation of an island off the west coast of Ireland and in the cosiness of book and antique-selling in a small town on the adjoining mainland. Brigit, a young Scandanavian painter, lives on the island and is living to paint and forget a suffocating relationship. Geoff, an English widower, runs a bookshop on the mainland, and is maddened by memories of his wife and little girl drowning 20 years previously. For years, he had successfully numbed much of his existence with drink but in the winter of this story he is sober and trying to know his son and son's family who live nearby. Geoff becomes friends with his neighbouring antique shop-owners, two sisters, one of whom is ill. Such a summary implies a melancholy story but in fact anything these characters face is dealt with by anybody any day.
Like ex-pats in other foreign communities, the main characters lead solvent, private and almost invisible lives where "the local events had a soothing irrelevance". This is in vivid contrast to the hardship of life for previous generations on the island, exemplified by Brigit's elderly neighbours, or in present-day Africa, to where Brigit follows a friend and where "failure never surprises".
With a tightly-controlled structure in this first novel, the writer gives herself generous time to reward the reader with intense and personal emotion conveyed in her illuminant prose. Orla Murphy has a background in painting and sculpture, is a trained conservator of books, and consequently has the keenness of an eye used to co-ordinating the intricacies of medium, paper, light. This skill applies whether she is describing painting, the landscape and sea, or Geoff's desperate battle to stay away from despair and drink. "Next, she washed the brush, dried it on the rag and took a speck of black and mixed it, swirling it deep into the white, until a very faint, even, grey pool, thin as cream, lay on the plate."
One unwise device was to have Brigit write a series of letters describing the meaning of her art. The author does not entirely avoid a portentous tone and these passages are weak in comparison to the clarity and honesty of her descriptions of the observance and mechanics in painting. Some artists instinctively dread the current demands from galleries that they verbalise their art with accompanying commentary to their exhibits.
The well-constructed narrative successfully connects these honourable people's lives so we have a complete story. What is fulfilling about The Sway of Winter is an optimism about humanity and a trust in redemption.
Olivia Hamilton is an editor and teacher
The Sway Of Winter. By Orla Murphy. Lilliput Press, 220pp.
€11.99