BOOK OF THE DAY: ANNA CAREYreviews Civil StrangeBy Cláir Ní Aonghusa Penguin Ireland 305pp, £12.99
ELLEN, the heroine of Cláir Ní Aonghusa’s debut novel, is looking for a new life. A year after the collapse of her marriage, she has left her teaching job and moved to the small rural village where she spent holidays as a child. Taking over the cottage that once belonged to her late cousins, she tries to settle in to village life. But it’s not as easy as it seems. Her uncle Matt advises her to “play it civil and strange” – she should be polite to the locals, but wary. Because, as Ellen soon discovers, everyone in the village has a story to tell – usually about someone else in the village. The sour older women who seem to watch her every move certainly enjoy a good scandal. And as Ellen tries to make herself at home, with a new job and a (possible) new romance, she can’t avoid becoming the centre of attention.
On the cover, Frank McGuinness compares Civil Strange(a wonderful title, although the ampersand makes it look like a firm of solicitors) to both Maeve Binchy and John McGahern, which seems just about right. Unsentimental but often tender, Ní Aonghusa is at her best when describing the characters' inner lives, particularly Ellen and her new friend Beatrice, a widow grieving the suicide of one son and attempting to build a new relationship with the other. But the dialogue often falls flat; characters start to speak in long, leaden paragraphs that show no awareness of the rhythms and music of ordinary speech. And at times the narrative is equally stilted, as the story jerks from one scene to another with an awkwardness that can leave the reader feeling slightly disorientated.
The book also feels strangely dated. The depiction of a changing Ireland, in which people are finally breaking away from the old conservatism but where it’s still seen as shocking when a separated teacher dares to have a relationship with a new man, seems to belong in the 1980s at best. I had to keep reminding myself that most of the older characters were only meant to be in their early 60s; in their views and some of their experiences, they seem to belong to the previous generation. Beatrice refers to loveless marriages of convenience as being more or less the norm among her peers, which seems slightly pessimistic for someone who presumably married in the late 1960s. The book was first published in the United States, and at times it seems designed to meet American expectations of an Ireland that is changing but still comfortingly conservative and traditional. But in other ways, Civil Strange does capture something of modern Ireland.
A motorway threatens to turn the village into a commuter town; many families have been touched by the suicide of young men. And the whole story is never anything less than readable. The characters, whatever decade they seem to hail from, are ultimately convincing and, in many cases, sympathetic. Ellen is a particularly appealing heroine, a perfect mixture of vulnerability and grit, and the reader can’t help hoping she manages to find the new life she’s seeking. And, dodgy patches of dialogue aside, Ní Aonghusa writes gracefully, with touches of lyricism. She even refuses to tie the story up too neatly, leaving readers with an ending both satisfying and realistic. An uneven but very promising debut novel.
Anna Carey is a freelance journalist