FICTION: Stand By Me,By Sheila O'Flanagan, Headline Review, 455pp. £12.99
DOMINIQUE BRADY doesn’t seem like the sort of teenager who will one day be a glittering society queen. Spotty and shy, she’s an ordinary girl from a not particularly loving family in Drimnagh. Her coldly religious mother has eyes only for her saintly elder brother, and her ineffectual father simply keeps out of the family squabbles. But then Dominique meets Brendan Delahaye, an ambitious young builder, and falls in love.
When their first sexual encounter leads to pregnancy, the couple marry; Dominique is charmed by the warm, loving Delahaye family, who all call her Domino. Meanwhile, Brendan is moving from builder to property developer, and as his fortunes rise Dominique is at his side. She becomes a charity fundraiser and celebrated hostess. But, this being a Sheila O’Flanagan book, her life isn’t as simple as that.
Brendan is a loving husband, but he’s also a selfish one. He doesn’t keep Dominique informed of his business decisions until they’ve been made, announcing out of the blue that the family will be moving to Cork. And that’s not Dominique’s only problem. After her baby is born she experiences severe postnatal depression, which leaves her incapacitated for weeks. And although she comes through it and ends up campaigning for support services, her troubles are far from over.
Twenty years later, when her daughter, Kelly, is a confident young student, Brendan’s property empire comes crashing down, and he flees the country without a word, leaving Dominique not only pennliess but facing the wrath of all the people her husband has ruined.
O’Flanagan’s new novel is one of the first examples of post-boom commercial fiction. It could be argued that the rise in Irish chick-lit writers coincided with the boom, that, as the country grew more confident and worldly, Irish women wanted to write about the new Ireland – a world more suited to glossy commercial fiction than the dour, church-dominated country of the recent past – and international audiences wanted to read about it.
But Ireland has come down to earth with a bump, and it seems that at least some of those writers are willing to reflect the new reality. In Stand By MeDominique, who admits she has always trusted her husband to look after the financial side of their life, has to learn to live without the glamorous trappings that were part of her old life and stand on her own feet. She has to draw on her reserves of strength and determination as her former friends and even her relatives turn away from her.
And readers will be cheering her on. Vulnerable but neither feeble nor weak, Dominique is an appealing heroine despite her financial naivity. She stands up for herself whether it’s against her religious mother, her bitchy sister-in-law or her selfish husband. O’Flanagan writes about her heroine’s experiences of postnatal depression with compassion and insight, as Dominique feels lost in a dark mixture of self-hatred and an inability to love her baby.
O’Flanagan is a fluid writer with the rare ability to write convincing dialogue, and the book’s characters, from Dominique to her confused friend Emma; her conflicted priest brother, Gabriel; her kindly brother-in-law, Greg; and her spirited daughter, Kelly, generally ring true.
The book is, however, far too long – it could have easily lost about 100 pages. At times the pacing becomes slightly turgid, as we slowly move from one stage of Dominique's life to another. And those who have remained immune to O'Flanagan's writing so far are unlikely to be suddenly won over by Stand By Me. But her fans will definitely enjoy this thoughtful novel.
Anna Carey is a freelance journalist
