FICTION: ShadowstoryBy Jennifer Johnston Headline Review, 233pp. £14.99
JENNIFER JOHNSTON'S recent novel Foolish Mortals(2007) dealt with one of those complicated contemporary families in which, in spite of a tangle of divorces and step-parents and new-age partnerships, everyone more or less muddled along.
Shadowstoryis also about a complicated family. But the family belongs not to new liberal Ireland but to the period not so long gone when religious and social rules were inflexible and had the power to ruin people's lives.
Whereas the family in Foolish Mortalsaccepts almost any permutation of sexual relationship, the family in Shadowstorycan tolerate only one. In a novel about the the struggle for many kinds of freedom (personal, religious and political), endogamy – marriage within the tribe – is the rule. Of course, endogamy is also regulated, and the incest taboo is the most interesting issue to be mooted in the novel.
Polly, the first-person protagonist, is born during the second World War, into the Irish landed gentry. Her father is killed in the war and her mother, the tellingly named Nonie (she plays no real role in Polly’s life), marries again. Polly feels she is an outsider in the new family, which resides in Sandymount, on the seafront. “In photographs of us all I was always a step or two to the left or right, a slightly anxious smile on my face, looking like a polite visitor,” she says.
Her real home is Kildarragh, her grandparents’ big house not far from Gort – there’s a whiff of Lady Gregory and Yeats about the place. Polly adores everything about it: the kitchen and library, the pony, the scenery, the dog, Sadie the housekeeper, her kind, wise grandparents, and her uncles Harry and Stephen: the latter is just five years her senior.
The shadowiness of the novel is that it focuses not so much on Polly as on these uncles. Harry, a minor character, leaps abruptly into prominence when he becomes engaged to a Catholic girl, Katie the doctor’s daughter. The notorious Ne Temere decree raises its ugly head, and the gloves come off on each side – Harry’s father, understandably, rants on about freedom: he has already lost a son and daughter in the fight against fascism.
Katie’s mother, who seemed like “a pretty woman, neat and nicely scented . . . a perfect doctor’s wife”, reveals her tough side – her family “coming down with priests” and “the bishop is adamant”. There’s more than one kind of tyranny.
In the shadow of this dramatic, affecting and well-turned plot runs another story of tabooed love, which might be expected to take precedence, given that it involves Polly herself. The incest business. That story is never resolved, one way or the other. That is not in itself unpredictable or unconvincing, and the subtle ending of the novel is perfect.
Nevertheless there is a sense in which what should be the central story simply drifts away. Even if this is the point – and it may well be – it’s not satisfactory.
The novel’s real strength is not its plot, its characters or even its great theme, however, but its descriptive passages. Polly’s life is lived between two seas. She is literally littoral, always on one coast or the other, and the author allows her to be a sensitive observer. Her pictures of the Irish Sea, the Atlantic and the landscape around Kinvarragh, as well as of the interior of the grandparents’ house, are just wonderful. You can taste the hot buttery scones that Sadie makes on the griddle – in Jennifer Johnston novels you often find yourself getting hungry – and you can taste the salt on the air when Polly rides her pony across the fields and down to beach, or swims in the ocean on a dazzling summer’s day.
“Why do you want to paint it?” Polly asks an artist friend, Marcus, on that idyllic day.
He says: “Things fade. I have to look at pictures of my father now, if I want to remember what he looked like. If he came out from behind that tree now, this moment, I probably wouldn’t recognise him.”
Marcus’s words could be a mission statement for the novelist. In revisiting the world of the upper-middle-class Protestants, “where all’s accustomed, ceremonious”, and which is familiar to us from some of her most powerful writing, Johnston appears to be concerned, above all, to describe what that vanished world was like. Her beautiful evocations of everyday life in an Irish country house are by far the best thing in this ambitious and interesting if sometimes overly shadowy novel.
Éilís Ní Dhuibhne teaches creative writing at University College Dublin and the Faber Academy. Her latest book, as Elizabeth O'Hara, is Snobs, Dogs and Scobies(New Island, 2011). Her collection of short stories, The Shelter of Neighbours,will be published by the Blackstaff Press in February
