Consequences of the Heart is Peter Cunningham's latest novel and it is his best; if he never writes another word, he has won an enduring place in the literature of Ireland at the end of this century. And more than Ireland, for Consequences is a truly vast and universal book with universal application to universal feelings - feelings of love, and sex, and duty, and courage, and loyalty, and fear, and throughout, from first to last, of love.
Consequences is tied to Waterford, which for fictive purposes has become the town of Monument; but the hills and the steep streets and the dank stone quaysides of Monument are in fact those of the Waterford where Peter grew up, and the accents of so many of the characters who people this book are Waterford accents, with the strange and lifeless letter "r" littering their speech - a linguistic legacy, Peter has averred elsewhere, of the Norman-French difficulty in crisply enunciating that most elusive of consonants without turning it into a salivating aspirate.
Normandy landings
But though it captures Waterford so brilliantly, and the smells of the port and its river, Consequences is not a Waterford novel. It is a novel about the love of three people from childhood, reaching down through the decades of this century and concluding early in the next century. The journey through time moves to the D-Day landings in Normandy; and no account that I have read, no film that I have seen, captures the confusion, the violence, the randomness of death and the curious elations and terrors of battle as does Peter's description of the Normandy beaches, where two of our three protagonists find themselves. His uniquely powerful portrayal of the events there was certainly aided by the presence on the beaches 54 years ago of his father, Redmond.
Redmond, like the two Irishmen whose lives we follow, was serving with the Royal Engineers. For his bravery in action on D-Day he was awarded a British Military Cross, to which he added another MC and a French Croix de Guerre in subsequent encounters. Redmond's own recollections, and Peter's own researches through sapper archives, have helped to produce an extraordinarily powerful picture of that extraordinary day - a far more accurate one, I suspect, more telling, more truthful, that the gaudy spectacle of Saving Private Ryan.
But Consequences is not a war novel. It is a novel which follows its characters to the Normandy beaches, and it follows them back again, through the odd vicissitudes of Waterford life; but as the early events which touched upon the lives of three vital people - Chud, Jack and Rose - follow them down all the days of their lives, events on D-Day make their indelible mark too. We live with history as our companion and as our helmsman, both the history of our own personal lives and the greater history of our time. Rose, Chud and Jack are marked by that companionship, and by the hand of greater events steering their rudder towards their destiny. D-Day is the second pivotal event around which these people live their lives; the first is a mystery which is disclosed to us only at the very end, when D-Day itself is symbolically re-enacted 55 years later.
Waterford characters
Private lives and public events are locked together like a Claddagh ring, and illuminated by a parade of Dickensianly Waterford characters - the scheming, the low, the lofty, the ambitious, the cunning, the weak. One of the lamentable features of so much modern fiction is the absence of believable, engaging creatures within it; one of the lost arts of storytelling is conversation; one of the deplorable traits of so many novels is the absence of a plot.
Consequences triumphantly revels in the qualities so much modern fiction eschews, either because its writers can't manage them, or regard them as redundant. But Peter (a) can and (b) doesn't. In Consequences we are in a permanent rout of characters, jostling their way on the page, only to be elbowed aside by another personage who wishes to make our acquaintance. And this is done with enormous cleverness of language and subtlety of observation.
"The old days"
In one brilliantly caught moment, Cyril Turner, one of Monument's more egregiously disgusting citizens, thinks he has one up on Chud, who is trying to read his newspaper:
Grunting refusal, I remained behind my paper.
"It'll be like the old days again at Main, by God, my father used to tell me about them. What a way for Monument to end the century."
I looked up. "What are you talking about?"
Cyril stiffened and went quiet, as if scenting game on the wind.
"Kevin Santry's Annabelle is getting married to one of the Loves," he whispered in a voice that did not dare believe in its luck.
And who has not seen the gun-dog look of imminent quarry on the face of someone about to break bad tidings to an enemy? Who has not heard the voice that does not believe its luck at such times? But who before has managed to capture both such sensations so tellingly and in so few words?
Consequences of the Heart is a truly marvellous book, at times hilariously comical, at times profoundly moving, and at all times entrancing. Peter Cunningham is a storyteller at the height of his powers, and Consequences of the Heart is his triumph.