With stories of paedophilia and incest consuming large numbers of column inches in our newspapers, it was inevitable that someone would write a novel about child abuse. And in fact, in the first part of The Fish in the Stone, the third from Cork writer Eamonn McGrath, there is an uneasy sense of formula writing; characters lack dimension, and the context, which seems forced, is not examined or interrogated sufficiently deeply.
The story of an incestuous relationship between a father and daughter makes up the centre of the novel. The father's desire for his daughter is explained as his way to replace the love his wife never offered him. The problem is that you can always guess what characters will say next, and what the next chapter will try to do. Surely a novel about the descent of a nuclear family into dissolution should have a dangerous, careering unpredictability about it? This work doesn't.
The pious character of the mother, Mrs Ennis, is straight from the world of liberal demonology. She can only respond to the ritual violation of her daughter by praying to God to make it stop. The idea that she might react at a less sublime level is never considered. This is regrettable, since it is apparent that McGrath can see the outline of the deeper, more dangerous novel he could have written. There is a decent exploration of male sexuality and the way it can be skewed in horrendous ways. But McGrath only circles the subject and does not really dig deep enough.
The explanation - and what the narrator gives us is an "explanation" - of the father's desire for his daughter, Mary, is loose and in some ways benign. McGrath uses pages of the novel to describe the father's combination of tenderness and brutality toward his daughter. When he does this, the note of narrative detachment is well struck, but the idea that both father and daughter are victims soon begins to show strain.
Readers will be left wondering if the experience of sexual abuse victims always follows the predetermined, consecutive and tidy stages of denial, self-blame, betrayal and finally anger. McGrath's novel rarely steps outside these static frames of reference. The book compartmentalises human nature to excessive degrees.
It is when the author does move beyond the frame of convent ion that the novel begins to come alive. The increasing levels of manipulation and sadism (Mary is savagely beaten; a cat is slowly drowned in the kitchen sink) provide the means for the novel to peer into the darkness and see human nature turn appallingly bad.
The father's comment that "incest is only a false label thought up by people for something they're afraid of,' also indicates that the novel was meant to do more than stick to labels. However, it does not come close to doing this until the last few chapters.
The father's symbolic burning of the nuptial bed in the back garden begins a set of ugly events that end in the daughter's murder and his suicide. The slow-witted response of the authorities only reminds us that disfigured humanity often finds unintentional accomplices.