Christine Dwyer Hickey’s 10th novel opens with an epigraph from Leonard Cohen: “Every heart, every heart, to love will come, But like a refugee ...” Within this quote, the DNA for the very particular love story that follows can be read: a tumultuous affair of the heart between two Irish outsiders struggling to survive in London across four decades. And yet, within Dwyer Hickey’s gaze, romance is a luxury that must earn its keep alongside other, often more powerful feelings of loneliness, fear, anger and shame.
In 1979, Milly is a teenage runaway who seeks refuge via employment and lodgings in a Clerkenwell pub. From behind the bar, she catches a glimpse of a young, melancholic boxer from the local boxing club. This half English/half Irish man, Pip, is a rising star who could become a champion if he doesn’t drown his talent in alcohol first. Haunted by TS Eliot’s The Waste Land, his anger propels him across the streets of London, potential trailing in his wake. From that first glimpse, their paths become interwoven. Although they are rarely together in body, in mind they seldom leave each other alone.
The foundations for this novel were laid when Dwyer Hickey spent some months working in a pub in London’s East End herself, observing the city around her. Her own outsider’s perspective has allowed her to construct the city anew – its vivid, pulsating energy is a compelling life force in the narrative. The changing socio-economic and cultural status of the city as gentrification takes hold is authentically and thoughtfully braided into the world-building. So much more than a backdrop, each decade in the evolving city is precisely drawn.
Those who have read Dwyer Hickey’s back catalogue of literary riches will be unsurprised that she never blinks when staring into the dark truth of the messiness of human behaviour. Or to discover that the relationship here contains multitudes. Unsentimental, this author cannot write a false sentence in the service of happily ever after. Her work is, of course, all the more powerful for it. This epic portrait of two complicated people is no exception. Dwyer Hickey has followed her award-winning novel of 2019, The Narrow Land, with a masterful work full of skilful nuance and profound truth. No doubt it too will be a strong contender for this year’s literary prizes.
