Orla Mackey’s resonant and multifaceted debut novel might best be thought of as a patchwork quilt. You know the type: well-worn, much-loved, repaired several times over (and often with bits and pieces of a curious provenance); it is a comfortable, familiar thing of the kind your grandmother might have made, one which has been passed down through the generations. Mouthing, and for that matter the village which is its setting, reflects that kind of richness. A single story cannot account for all they represent.
Everyone here has a tale to tell and, through Mackey’s acerbic characterisation, everyone gets their turn to weigh in on funerals and weddings, on hurling matches and on affairs. The village is a recognisable place, one that runs on gossip and on a delicious and barely disguised Schadenfreude. It is, in that sense, a rural Irish community like any other.
The meat of the novel is thus the recognisable world of country work. Of mending gaps in ditches and cleaning trenches. Of emigration and return. There is a pub and there is a priest. There are secrets and lies. It is by turns funny, horrifying, and all too real. The epigraph may come from Brendan Kennelly, but the presiding literary deity here is arguably Patrick Kavanagh who, donning the guise of Homer, declared: “I made the Iliad from such / a local row.”
This kind of material could easily become standard fare, but it is, in Mouthing’s case, greatly enlivened by its promising author’s clever structural choices and ability to capture a spectrum of realistic voices across the generations. These attributes collide in how Mackey organises the novel as a sort of maze bouncing across the timeline from the 1960s to the early 2000s, in the process exposing the many secrets people keep – and fail to keep – from one another. The narration is polyphonic but always recognisably of the same parish, and this provides a valuable binding agent in a story delivered as a series of short chapters that necessitate some flicking back and forth to keep track of what is happening (and when!).
More than that, however, Mackey’s structure rather brilliantly requires the reader to constantly reassess their opinions of the characters. It is a fascinating magic trick that the author admirably pulls off. The individuals here, all the blinkered heroes of their own sordid tales, shimmer with fractal richness as they are lensed in turn through the monologues of their family and neighbours. There is, after all, no such thing as objective truth in rural Ireland.
Nonetheless, many of these characters are genuinely broken individuals hurting from their pasts. They are often “suffering upstairs”, such as the housekeeper who essentially takes the parish priest hostage, or her farmer brother who is so lonely that he allows his cow into the livingroom. These different arcs slide smoothly over each other as Mouthing progresses.
Mackey further lets her narrative strands mirror each other across the decades, such as the tragic tale of a pregnant girl shipped off to an alcoholic aunt in Australia and, years later, the story of a mother suffering from debilitating post-partum depression. The results are not short stories exactly, they’re too intermeshed for that, but they do on occasion evoke the “fix-up” novels of old, woven together from shorter pieces of work.
While the order of the storytelling may initially appear quite random, Mackey has orchestrated her vignettes for maximum emotional effect. Again and again we meet a character, form an opinion, and almost immediately have that wittily torpedoed by another local with a legitimate grudge or an irrational resentment.
Early in the novel, for instance, we encounter Father Lennon as an interfering priest out to ruin people’s lives lest a bit of introversion in his congregation makes him look bad. But, we quickly realise, all is not as it seems; his reticent parishioner is a controlling man succumbing to depression (a condition which abounds in Mouthing) while Lennon himself is equally troubled. This is to say that Mackey keeps moving the goalposts in a delightfully wicked fashion and we are always playing catch-up.
A book that makes the reader work like this is an admirable thing. At its best, this makes us involved, though one’s mileage may vary on the degree to which the stories cohere into a unified whole. Mouthing is, therefore, the kind of novel you might read twice in quick succession, once for the “global” view of the village and its inhabitants, once more for the detail of individual lives, lies, loves, and longings. Consumed in this manner, Mouthing proves an engrossing and adept work of fiction. It is, as they say, lovely hurling.
