“ ‘The home scar,’ she’d said. ‘That’s what they call the mark limpets make on the rock when they return.’ ” Kathleen MacMahon’s fourth novel, The Home Scar, tells the story of adult siblings trying to reconcile a childhood marked by instability and loss. Throughout the book there is a tremendous sense of nostalgia, in its literal translation from the Greek nostos, meaning home, and algos, pain, where the desire to return to one’s place of origin evokes suffering. But for siblings Christo and Cassie, the offspring of famous musicians, there is no place of origin per se. They spent their childhoods on tour: “They existed in a state of constant yearning, not for home but for the last place they’d been.” Their journey back to the past involves revisiting Connemara, where they had one idyllic summer as preteens before everything went awry.
Artist Cassie flies in from Mexico, Christo from his job as a maths professor in Cambridge. Certain facts are established: they are half-siblings, their mother is dead, Cassie is an orphan, Christo might as well be for all the contact he has with his father, an ageing rock star. The peace they hope to find in the west of Ireland centres on a local family, whose son Seamus formed a trio with the siblings that fateful summer.
To say too much more would spoil one of the pleasures of MacMahon’s writing, namely the elegant way she imparts information as the story unfolds. She is a natural storyteller, knowing when to withhold or indulge. Her writing is understated and precise, full of cadence, as she switches expertly between the perspectives of the siblings and local man Seamus. The book opens in classical style, with a general picture of a bad weather event and the effect it has on the country, before narrowing to the individual characters, whose impulses are evocatively described: “[Cassie] had the sense they were chasing time. Like they were trying to catch a boat that would not sail again.”
In a slightly hokey conversation later in the book between Seamus and a librarian, great American female writers such as Elizabeth Strout, Ann Patchett, Anne Tyler are lauded for their unpretentious storytelling: “But the hardest thing of all is to make it look easy, and the women get that.” The same can be said of MacMahon’s style: no pyrotechnics, just a careful study of ordinary lives, or in this case, ordinary lives of extraordinary heritage. To draw comparisons with Irish contemporaries, writers such as Danielle McLaughlin, Nuala O’Connor and Henrietta McKervey come to mind.
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MacMahon is a former radio and television journalist who lives in Dublin with her family. Her debut novel, This Is How it Ends, was translated into more than 20 languages and spent five weeks at the top of the best-seller lists in Ireland. It was followed by The Long, Hot Summer, also a best-seller in Ireland, and Nothing But Blue Sky, which was nominated for the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2021.
There’s a superb authenticity to each of the voices in The Home Scar. Christo, the reserved professor whose life is passing him by, a man “more interested in the natural world than the human one”. Cassie, whose strength of character is brilliantly juxtaposed with her brittleness: “[She] could handle any hard thing that was thrown at her, but softness she could not bear.” Then the quiet, wry voice of Seamus: “At the university, everyone he knew was writing a book, so their interest in anyone else’s was purely combative.”
[ A City of the Past: short story by Kathleen MacMahonOpens in new window ]
MacMahon is equally adept at rendering place, particularly coastal locations (a trait notable in her previous books too): “A few miles out of town they took the turn for Omey Island, driving down a long finger of land with the silvery sea to their left. They rounded the tip of the peninsula and saw the island ahead, separated only from the mainland by a spit of tidal sand.”
The tempo of the present-day action, which takes place over a few days, is interrupted somewhat by a tendency to divert into the past in lengthy asides, but these passages of backstory are interesting in their own right, helping to further illuminate the characters. If one of the traits of a great novelist is their insight into the human condition, MacMahon has it in spades. Even the difficult characters in the book are understood on multiple levels; a poignant scene with an elderly nun towards the end gives the siblings a new perspective on their troubled mother: “A spiritual person, but she was looking for meaning in all the wrong places.” Ultimately The Home Scar is a powerful story about legacy, loss and the possibility of reconciliation, or as Seamus’s father, Jim, puts it: “‘I accept that, and I’m sorry for it, but there’s no undoing it now.’”
