Dismantling Mr Doyle, by James Ryan, Phoenix House, 185pp, £15.99 in UK
James Ryan is very interested in how families cope with the intrusion of truth into lives built on falsehood. "Dismantling" is a fine word for the process he intends all the characters in the Doyle family to undergo, as one after another they are faced with realities they had hoped to avoid.
For example, Mr Doyle confronts retirement after years in the insurance business. His career serves as an apt metaphor for his whole life, which has been ordered, controlled, "insured", at great cost to his wife and children. The shock for Mr Doyle is that his obsessively contrived identity begins to unravel and he is forced to discover that life is not predictable.
Similarly, as his wife and daughter Eve are faced with the secret he has hidden for years, they desperately defend themselves in characteristic ways against the effects of the revelation. At the same time, Eve's childhood boyfriend Eugene must come to terms with her rejection of him and the possible loss of the one-big-happy family scenario on which he has based his hopes for the future.
Showing the subtleties of moments of reckoning such as these, in which huge internal shifts will occur as new awarenesses and the emotions that attend them are taken in, is an extremely difficult task for any writer. Although I do not think James Ryan succeeds in this task as consistently as he might, I also think the reasons are fairly clear. And because there is evidence here, and in his first novel, Home from England, which was very well received, that Ryan is an able and serious writer, I feel sure he can meet the challenges these problems present.
Part of the difficulty is that he tries to follow too many threads of too many breakdowns, giving too many details (Eve's academic life in America, for instance) that divert from the intense focus necessary to depict emotional crisis. I often felt hurried on from one character to another before his or her experiences had been sufficiently probed. In fact, the breakdown Ryan apparently considers central to all the others (the dismantling of Mr Doyle) never receives the sustained exploration it would require to anchor the book. If anything, Eve's story is given much more weight than Mr Doyle's, to the extent that her pre-occupations open and close the book at some length and are accorded a lot of space in between.
In addition, one often has the impression that an important experience has been unexpectedly introduced by the writer and then dropped. An example of this is the final sexual encounter between Eugene and Eve. We have no sense ahead of time that it will happen and are not allowed to see it. We learn about it briefly through Eve's confused reactions afterward. Then the episode disappears from the character's life without any apparent impact, and we have come no closer to understanding her.
To show characters growing and changing through major experiences, a novelist must really get inside them emotionally. Ryan undermines this possibility when he tells us too much about what his characters think and feel, rather than simply showing them to us and letting them speak for themselves.
Elsewhere, however, he enters his characters' inner lives beautifully: Eugene waiting hopefully for Eve's arrival at the airport, Mr Doyle's aimless wandering through town as a lost man, Mrs Doyle's despair after Eve confronts her with the secret. Each of these passages is full of feeling that rang completely true for me. And the writing is subtle and suggestive. More of this and I think James Ryan is on track.
Alison Dyes third novel, An Awareness of March, was published in April