Over the past few years, new Irish novelists have been coming up with increasingly original ideas, moving away from a period where tried and commercially trusted formulas dominated. In her debut, Niamh Ní Mhaoileoin adds her name to this list with a premise that sounds outlandish but is nevertheless based in reality. What happens in the book, after all, has to happen to someone.
The narrator, Jay, is a young woman whose late brother Ferdia was in training for the priesthood when he tragically died. Now, some years later, he’s being considered for sainthood. Yes, that’s still a thing, she tells various friends, presenting some rather fascinating statistics, both for their benefit and ours. Having exiled herself to London, mostly to escape well-meaning but exasperating parents, this unexpected development forces her to examine her family history, along with her relationship with a church that has rarely been a friend to gay men or lesbians.
‘Can you imagine me there in the front row in St Peter’s Square?’ she asks, baffled by the process that’s kicking into gear. ‘The lesbian sister of a literal saint.’
Sensible novelists practise caution when writing about the church, knowing that to villainise priests is to descend into cliche, while to praise them is to ignore the many crimes for which their institution has been held responsible. One way to do it, and which Ní Mhaoileoin adopts successfully, is to present those in positions of clerical authority as relatively benign figures, apparently doing all they can to help their congregations, while nevertheless supporting an organisation that many would argue was built upon the subjugation of women and the glorification of the traditional Irish family, which has not always been the flawless institution they would have us believe.
Jay is rightly sceptical about the church’s motivations for trying to force her dead brother into a role he never asked for, and also disturbed by what might lie ahead. There’s talk of exhumation, of moving his remains to an overground shrine in Knock, of the need for miracles to be confirmed and ascribed to him, of having his clothes cut into tiny pieces and distributed to the faithful as relics. However, she never mocks those for whom faith is a bedrock of their lives and, when she challenges true believers, she’s often left confronting her own prejudices. This is exactly how contemporary, provocative literature should operate.
And yet, there are things that rankle. In a flashback scene, while referring to a prayer, Ferdia’s reference to the future Pope Francis feels shoehorned into the text – ‘I recently heard that one of the new cardinals – a guy called Bergoglio – says it helps him in his duties’, while a few pages on Matt Talbot turn into a screed against the current Bishop of Rome and come across as authorial intrusion.
And then there’s Ní Mhaoileoin’s relentless use of the word ‘queer’, which shows up a dozen times, thrice, over five pages in various formations. It’s a word that remains deeply offensive to anyone who grew up at a time when it was used as a term of abuse and, even now, would never go unchallenged, so its repetition feels deliberately pointed. For many gay readers, including this one, it’s like nails on a chalkboard.
However, such irritations are balanced by things that are too good to ignore. A scene where Jay meets an old seminarian friend of her brother is compelling, and when Jay recalls her brother lying in his bed, ‘weighed down by a lasagne of woollen blankets’, she provides one of the most brilliant images I’ve read in some time. A scene set in London towards the end, where Jay spends time with both her mother and her girlfriend, is beautifully written, genuinely moving, and often quite funny.
In fact, it’s the perfect ending for the novel, and I reached the last page – or what I thought was the last page – literally wiping tears from my eyes. But a wholly unnecessary final chapter deflates the emotional power of what the author has just created, and I longed to be an editor, leaping in and insisting that no, this is how the book should conclude.
But then, the most memorable novels are often those that balance strong writing, intriguing characters, and inventive plotlines with occasional moments of frustration. And Ordinary Saints will, I think, prove memorable.
