Caoilinn Hughes’s second novel continues in the same vein as her debut, Orchid and the Wasp (2018), offering a razor-sharp snapshot of a family and a nation in trouble, in language that is vital and richly inventive.
This time around the landscape is rural Ireland: Roscommon in 2008, a time of recession. That Hughes manages to breathe so much life into such a depressing and well-trodden period of recent Irish history is a remarkable achievement.
Her story centres around two brothers, Cormac and Hart Black, and their efforts to assist in the suicide of their father, the Chief, who is dying from terminal cancer, but also, one suspects, from the shock of losing his farm and legacy to a property investment gone south.
The subject of assisted suicide is an inspired metaphor for boom-to-bust Ireland. Later parts of the novel vividly capture the unfairness of a trial that seeks to punish the family for helping their father carry out his dying wishes and leave the world with a modicum of respect. And respect is in short supply in Roscommon. The Chief is a man brought to his knees by callous property moguls and poor decision-making. He works relentlessly on a farm he no longer owns, trying to leave behind some kind of legacy for his sons.
In poignant, impressionistic prose, his younger son, Hart, tells the story of the Chief: a honest, hard-working man, a decent father and husband, salt of the earth. Hughes gets us incredibly close to her characters with descriptions that come alive on the page.
Hart is the good-looking one of the brothers: “Square skull, cultured nose, the kind of eyes you might describe as pea and mint soup, best served cold.” Older brother Cormac is the smart one, the one who escapes to college in Galway. He is the brains of the operation: “I remember his frown: the little omega sign at the bridge of his nose, there to stay.”
Brother vs brother
But, crucially, Hart is the one who does the grunt work, and the unequal nature of the load makes for a dynamic narrative as the brothers square off against each other. “This is the prodigal son scéal of our times,” says Hart, in a prophetic statement that proves tragically true by the book’s end.
The tension between Hart’s innocence and the more jaunty, authorial tone of the book is wielded skilfully by Hughes. The tragicomic style is reminiscent of Kevin Barry, the brutal truths told in a slick, offhand manner. In The Wild Laughter, there are frequent flashes of humour delivered in a style that uses exaggeration to great effect to point out the absurd (and the blindingly obvious).
On the woeful lending policies of boom-time Ireland: “But no one voiced a word of provocation or changed the planning legislation or sought out unbiased advice or turned down the 10K loan when they’d only asked the bank teller for directions.” On Cormac’s schemes and calculations: “One of them scenarios like if a train is going at such-and-such a pace in the direction of a stone wall but it’s absolute gas craic on the train, what are your options?”
Gut-wrenching loss
From the opening pages, the narrative is appropriately fast-paced, swerving from scene to scene. Lambs are gutted, girlfriends stolen, last-supper trips are made to mobile homes. There is a maniacal quality to proceedings that makes the loss more gut-wrenching when it comes. Our sympathies lie with Hart, who becomes his beloved father’s palliative nurse without choice and without complaint: “Because Cormac had the brains and ability to make a few cute moves, when all I could do was scrub the shite off the mattress my mother couldn’t bring herself to touch.”
Hughes has interesting things to say on various cherished Irish institutions: the theatre, the Catholic Church, the idealised matriarch figure. Mother Nora will be no one’s idea of an angel: “For a minute, I thought she looked handsome, in the hoary way of a fossil – after all, she gave me the nose I have and the long eyelashes – but then, the way her eyes devoured her husband’s face, she looked wicked again.”
The pedigree of Hughes’ writing is already established. Orchid & the Wasp won the Collyer Bristow Prize, and was shortlisted for the Hearst Big Book Awards and the Butler Literary Award. Her poetry collection, Gathering Evidence (2014), won the Shine/Strong Award and her short fiction was the winner of the Moth International Short Story Prize 2018 and an O Henry Prize in 2019.
The Wild Laughter will surely see her gain further acclaim – it’s an exhilarating and moving story of an Ireland in disarray.
