In the opening pages of Nesting, Roisín O’Donnell’s confident and compelling debut novel, a family of four visits a cafe in Skerries called Storm in a Teacup. A normal family, with normal names: Ciara (mum), Ryan (dad), and Ella and Sophie (the two toddler daughters). They’ve just had a paddle at the beach, and it has occurred to Ciara that her husband is “The type of man who other women sneak glances at”. It has also occurred to her that her family “blend in perfectly” with the “festive atmosphere” along the harbour.
What kind of person needs to tell herself that her family blends in perfectly? Ciara is “flooded by the uncanny sense that she’s trapped. Stuck in this bright day forever. She’s invisible, walking unseen through the crowds”. Something is wrong.
It becomes clear that Ciara has squirrelled away some money that Ryan gave her to buy the girls new wetsuits. Not much money; but Ciara lies about it. Ryan confronts her. She evades. In a few pages all is made obvious. Ryan controls the money; Ryan uses silence as a weapon; Ciara does not love him. Storm in a Teacup is where, almost unconsciously, Ciara decides to take the kids and the squirrelled away money and flee her intolerable husband for a new, uncertain life
Note, again, the name of the cafe. Ciara’s family, browbeaten by Ryan’s emotional abuse, is a storm in a teacup (violent energies in a tiny space); or Ciara is the teacup, and the storm is in her heart; or the novel we’re about to read, a simple-seeming account of a woman attempting to liberate herself from the coercive control of a manipulative creep, is a storm in a teacup, that is, a work of domestic realism.
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That’s a lot of signification to pack into the name of a cafe at the beginning of your novel. What “Storm in a Teacup” tells us is that O’Donnell is a writer unwilling to let her details stand as mere details. And if I point out that Storm in a Teacup in Skerries is an actually existing cafe, you might learn something else about what kind of writer O’Donnell is, and what kind of novel Nesting is. This is a writer, and a novel, deeply concerned to notate a real Ireland: to show us to ourselves, whether we like it or not.
Bad marriages make good novels, but Nesting isn’t really about Ciara and Ryan’s marriage; it’s about what happens when Ciara walks out. In Ryan, O’Donnell has been careful to create not an obvious monster but an un-obvious one. The damage Ryan inflicts on Ciara is emotional, not physical; O’Donnell knows that this makes it more difficult to explain to other, perhaps unsympathetic people. Ryan uses the classic tactics of an emotional abuser. He isolates Ciara from her friends, he refuses to let her work, he browbeats her into sharing his opinions, he installs tracking software on her phone.
If there’s a problem with Nesting, actually, it’s that Ryan’s too classic. He’s too completely the oleaginous, misogynistic creep. We’re told about, rather than shown, his unimpeachable facade: “Respectful to everyone. A regular Mass attender. Volunteer at the local GAA club.” But we have to take all this on faith.
We’re also asked to take it largely on faith that Ciara simply fell for a baddie. A certain kind of novelist might point us towards the half-hidden impulsions that brought Ryan and Ciara together in the first place (Anne Enright, you find yourself thinking, wouldn’t let Ciara’s motives off the hook so easily). When, late in the novel, Ciara meets a therapist, the scene serves merely to confirm Ryan’s toxicity and Ciara’s vulnerability.
But questions of motivation aren’t really what Nesting is about. What the novel does, superbly, is walk us through the painful process of trying to extricate oneself from an abusive marriage: the panicked packing, the nights spent in the car with the kids, the scramble for a B&B, the dismal journey through Ireland’s overloaded and Byzantine emergency accommodation system (Ciara and the girls end up living in a hotel), the search for free legal aid.
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Nesting burns with the need to tell you what all of this is really like, to show us that all of this is happening now, not to “other people” but to people, that is, to human beings, to us. It is a novel bright with the energy of its mission, a novel about a country in which men still hold most of the cards, and in which independence (the book’s true subject) is still, for many women, not remotely a given. Here is a novelist who has powerful news to tell, and an impressive range of narrative gifts with which to tell it.
Kevin Power is a novelist, critic and assistant professor in English at Trinity College Dublin
