Press: Tatty gets her nickname for being a "telltale tattler". And as everyone knows, of course, a telltale tattle is a kind of informer; a child betrayer to adults of secrets and a teller of lies.
Tatty is not the villain, though. Her propensity for stories is born out of the conspiracy of silence enveloping the heavy drinking of her mother and father. She is forced, then, to present a public face of the happy child from the happy home while, in private, her world is one of ever-increasing distress.
Christine Dwyer Hickey's achievement is the creation of Tatty's voice, a voice that guides the reader through this world from her limited child's perspective. The uncertainty surrounding her family and her relationship to it are thus made all the more palpable as Tatty tries to make sense of what appear to be inscrutable adult actions and reactions.
It means, however, that a coherent vision or a clear perspective of events is not allowed to emerge. There is no censure, no condemnation on the part of the narrator: things just are as they are.
In a way, the novel reads like an extended short story in that what is presented are fleeting images without context. Moments and scenes are presented with luminous detail as smells, sounds, tangible silences are described. This sense of detachment is reinforced by a curiously flat tone of diffident acceptance of the verbal and physical abuse meted out by the alcoholic parents, especially Tatty's mother. Such numbness, nevertheless, is a wholly appropriate response, reflecting the deadened senses of a child conditioned to dealing with the extraordinary as the norm, day in and day out. It is the reader who is obliged to work, to be the responsible adult and become horrified at the story being told.
It is this juxtaposition of the ordinary and the extraordinary that allows Dwyer Hickey to dwell on other aspects of family life and the wider concerns of Ireland in the 1960s and 1970s.
The intricacies of class are brilliantly observed in the quantity and quality of lunchtime fare at school, as are the torments of making and keeping friends in the fast-moving and fickle world of children. That Tatty's family are respectably middle-class and quite well off ensures that the expected stereotypes associated with such an Irish story are absent.
It is a bleak picture of life on offer in this novel. It is a world of anger and frustration, and of potential violence. All the characters are damaged in their own way, and the novel succeeds in presenting the nuanced differences between each character. The fragmentary and limited nature of the narrative suggests that transcendence is not possible.
Significantly, Tatty never makes use of the word "I", as if holding off from making that kind of assertive declaration of identity and independence. And yet Tatty, in her act of telling, does assert herself and begin to take control of her situation. Her tragedy is that her growing up has been so rapid. Her fearful, bewildered, tentative and, at times, happy voice registers the anxieties of her existence, as well as the awful consequences of a life spent covering up the nightmarish realities of her home life.
• Derek Hand is a lecturer in English at St Patrick's College, Drumcondra, Dublin. His book, John Banville: Exploring Fictions, is published by Liffey