Some of the central characters in Henrietta McKervey’s latest book, The Heart of Everything, are immediately very appealing – Mags Jensen herself, of course, and her son Raymond and daughter Elin. They are all portrayed in an empathetic, affectionate manner. They are all quite charming. Raymond and Elin’s secret vices (drinking to excess, running away from responsibility) appear at first to be very human and eminently forgivable. For me, however, it is the eldest of Mags’ children, her daughter Anita, who stands out as the most interesting and important character in the book – despite the fact that she is not immediately as appealing as her mother or siblings. We first meet her entering Mags’ house, preparing to take her for a dental appointment, and feeling “[c]ross, cranky, snappy, snarky”. Her bad mood quickly turns even more bitter when she discovers that her mother is in fact missing.
It becomes clear as events unfold that Anita’s default setting is indeed bitterness; and general resentment, particularly towards her ineffectual younger siblings. Of course, as an eldest child myself, I immediately identified with this very understandable viewpoint, especially as Raymond becomes revealed during the narrative as rather feckless and irresponsible, and Elin turns out to be mired in self-pity and self-obsession. Anita, by contrast, is inclined to take control of things and to assume responsibility for others. As a result, it is true that she tends to harass and chivvy her mother to attend appointments and to look after herself, without attempting to understand her mother’s life or spend any quality time with her.
Anita’s own secret vice is comfort eating. Her guilt-ridden consumption of large quantities of fun-size KitKats is much less glamorous than the escape routes from reality chosen by her much cooler brother and sister.
Only as the story progresses further does it become apparent why Anita’s personality has developed in this way. She is a woman whose whole being has been fundamentally altered and shaped by grief. She is still deeply, poignantly, grieving for her six-year-old son Jack, who has died in a car accident eight years before Mags goes missing. The tragedy of his death is searingly portrayed in a series of scenes towards the latter half of the book that make for very painful reading, but which explain why Anita has been so sad and angry about her life ever since.
So, for me, grief is the big overarching theme of this book. It is there in Anita’s story, in the descriptions of her terrible visceral longing to hold her six-year old son in her arms again, in the memories of Jack climbing trees and playing games that strike her so forcefully every day, and in the relationships she has with her other children, who have all been so strongly affected by Jack’s absence.
But grief is also there, albeit more subtly, in Mags’ own story. It is vividly present in the way she remembers how her husband Per left her some decades previously, having gone back to his native Oslo for work and then fallen in love with another woman there. She recalls the sense of despair she felt after she received his letter ending their marriage, a despair that settled in her and stayed for years. She experienced it as a “sense of being exposed, raw, with nothing to mediate between her and the fierce stupidity of the world”. Decades on, she remembers that “terrible winter, when the truth of it sank in. He wasn’t coming back to them at all... Elin, her father’s little pet, sad and bewildered, the weight of the world on her thin shoulders; Raymond, furious and taking his anger out on Mags; Anita, freshly in love with Derek and not seeming to care.”
Clearly, Mags’ grief at being abandoned by her husband, while it is no longer as sharp or strongly felt as Anita’s pain, has shaped her own life, and the lives of her children, ever since his departure. Just as the terrible loss of Anita’s son has shaped her life, and her relationship with her mother and her husband Derek, as well as with her siblings and her other children.
This sense of grief and loss was the main emotion that stayed with me long after I had finished reading The Heart of Everything, trumping the perhaps more obvious issues the book also raises: sibling rivalries, family dynamics, missing persons, dementia, memory and forgetting. Above all, this powerful book provides an intense portrayal of the effect that grief can have, on an individual and on a family – that for me is its real strength, its enduring message.
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The Heart of Everything by Henrietta McKervey is published by Hachette Books Ireland, £12.99. Hodges Figgis offers a 10 per cent discount on Irish Times Book Club titles. Throughout May, we will publish a series of articles by the author, fellow writers and readers exploring the novel, culminating in a podcast to be recorded at the Irish Writers Centre on Thursday, May 26th, at 7.30pm, and published here on May 31st.
