Donal Ryan’s latest novel is a generational story of otherness set between rural Co Tipperary and London. Kit and Paddy Gladney are 1970s smallholders whose daughter Moll goes missing and comes back a few years later as if nothing had happened.
When a black Englishman called Alexander Elmwood arrives in Nenagh looking for her, his presence scandalises the surrounding parishes. Moll, it seems, has felt the need for a second flight: this time leaving Alex, who is her husband, and their baby son, Joshua, in London.
Her frequent urge for going remains largely mysterious as Alex and Joshua move into the Gladneys’ cottage, and Alex quickly comes to love his new surroundings (“Even the rain had a shimmer of green to it”). It takes the locals more time to adjust to his presence.
The prejudice of the time and place, along with fudged but honest movements towards acceptance, are shrewdly captured. When Alex gets promoted at a local factory there is initial resentment, but “with the settling of time came happiness that their mate Black Alex was in the office, looking out for them”.
Alex becomes a fixture of the local hurling team, recruited due to the assumption that his skin colour would make him automatically good at any sport. He becomes the focus of national news coverage when they are promoted. But while Alex eventually fits in, Moll’s true self and desires, and reason for escaping her home in the first place, are kept secret for years. And her feeling of discontentment, of being born separate and perhaps too fragile for the world, is passed down to their son.
The title Strange Flowers refers to Joshua when he is born: his unexpectedly light skin as seen by Paddy. But it also refers to the “seed of trouble” Moll’s parents see in her “that was flowering only now”. Joshua will in his turn feel the need to run away to London.
Medium
Ryan’s prose has a homely music to it. Formed of mellifluous, easy-going and conjunction-heavy run-on sentences, it is a medium where the author’s considered literary register meets the terms in which his characters would realistically think.
When Moll leaves, she “just made her bed and packed her few things into her mother’s old leather valise and went through the door and across the yard without a sound, and she walked down the lane to the village and she took the early bus to Nenagh and the train to Dublin” .
Kit’s voice is of a respectable person in a village talking fast at you off the top of their head: “People living together and having children before they were married at all and married people roaring for divorces and birth control, whatever the hell that was.”
Alex thinks of his friendship with Paddy – one of the many joys of this book – thus: “he loved to let the old man’s words float around him, filling the empty space around him, and he loved when Paddy said goodbye at the factory gate, saying, I’ll see you later, love. Always love.”
The Co Tipperary author is very good at evoking a world of hair dried by the fire: its stifling propriety, hypocrisy, sincerity and the accidental humour that is formed, pearl-like, by these conditions.
When missing Moll “was either pregnant or dead, and it was hard to know which one of those was worse”. Moll explains her work in London thus: “The man who owned the shop was from Pakistan, but he was so kind you’d nearly think he was Irish.” From here, the central characters unfold their richness. And there is unobtrusively brilliant writing about grief, love and belief to be had.
Feelings
The same sensibility that impelled Ryan to write about Farouk the Syrian doctor in From a Low and Quiet Sea, or Travellers in 2016’s All We Shall Know, has impelled him towards this dutiful, well-meaning though at times flawed fifth novel. In order to negotiate the feelings of then, and think his way into the heads of rural 1970s white people who had never met black people, he must naturally lean into their own cache of descriptive language. There is much made of full lips, full women and flat noses. Of people “black as night”, or as “the ace of spades”.
But when the novel inhabits the Elmwood family’s viewpoint in west London, there isn’t much in the way of a reckoning. Chicken, rice and peas. Men brutalised by the law turning domestically violent. Accented English: “She went at me with a broom handle one time, though. Broke it clean in two offa my back she did.” Even when sensitively laid out, it can seem rote.
So while Ryan’s writing about the form prejudice took in 1970s Ireland seems spot on, his writing about the black experience in London, and in general, leaves more to be desired. In aiming for equal immersion within every character, Ryan has exposed the unequal success of his depictions by comparison.
This works on the level of place too. If the rain shimmers green in Tipperary, there is only ever a rattle of the English metropolis. But where we find it, what a shimmer.
