Wunderland is the second novel by Irish writer Caitríona Lally, whose prize-winning debut, Eggshells, took the perspective of a lonely woman living in the margins of city life.
In this new book, Lally continues to look at the insides of outsiders. To begin with, the story centres on Roy, a taciturn and childlike middle-aged man who has left Ireland to take up a job as a cleaner at Miniatur Wunderland in Hamburg – an exhibition of 260,000 figurines arranged in everyday tableaux.
We soon learn that Roy is no harmless oddball – there is an undertow of anger and frustration within him. He surreptitiously smashes and steals figurines from the exhibition, bringing them home to his own private collection in the bedroom wardrobe.
You see, Roy had left Ireland to escape the “hostile untruths on his hometown streets” about his friendship with a teenager. This exile – or fresh start, depending how you look at it – was arranged by his older sister Gert, a 42-year-old carer and put-upon married mother of two. The premise of Wunderland is that she is visiting Roy for six days to check in with him, though not – as she assures him – to check up on him.
The novel is structured into six sections, each covering one of the six days, with chapters alternating between Roy and Gert; his chapters are written in the third personand hers in the first. This alternating style causes the novel to bifurcate, influencing the reader’s loyalties.
To Roy’s lack of warmth is added narrative distance – this accentuates his oddness and makes him less complex, less sympathetic. The plot thread about his workplace infractions is cast into shade by the more mature chapters about, and by, Gert, as she confides the difficulties of her marriage after her husband’s failed suicide attempts. (“What man would want to keep the woman who’s seen him at his worst, when he could start afresh with someone who’d seen him at his best?”)
Gert’s chapters are heartfelt and gently urgent monologues from real life, calling to mind the Talking Heads series by Alan Bennett. She is candid and authentic in capturing the draining reality of middle life, where love comes at the price of exhausting self-depletion.
While we get glimpses of the brother-sister relationship, by and large Lally resists using family dynamics as kindling for drama. You get the sense that she is willing to explore relationships more deeply, but perhaps not just yet – there is still too much to learn from understanding her characters as individuals.
As with Eggshells, the writing brims with Lally’s fascination with words – their origins, their meanings, their irregularity, their shapes (“K, if you rotated it sideways, was a rickety table”; “Heist was surely a German word: the vowels were in all the right places”). The shift in location to Hamburg provides a fruitful opening to include oddities and quirks of the German language, and each chapter is titled with a suitable German phrase (a chapter of Gert’s interiority is titled “Das Kopfkino = head cinema = playing scenarios in your mind”).
With the possible exception of Ali Smith, it’s hard to think of a writer who so relishes her immersion in the words she is using – it’s almost like a cookery programme where the chef licks her fingers as she goes.
There are one or two wrinkles. A reference to the European Championship final makes this (presumably inadvertently) a novel about a cleaner during a pandemic that is conspicuously absent from the book. Also, minor characters such as Roy’s colleagues Stefan and Inge are underdeveloped – they are introduced only to disappear almost immediately. But these are small points that ought not to detract from book’s undoubted quality.
Lally’s greatest strength is her skill in characterisation. She excels at creating undercurrents – there is a beautiful subtlety to the way her characters’ loneliness sits quietly in the background as they open up – and she invests deeply in giving them real things to say and feel.
Second novels are important. They are statement of artistic intent. Is the writer going to stick to what has already worked or grow into something new? In Wunderland, Caitríona Lally has developed the strengths of her debut intelligently and with subtle technical ambition, while recognising there is still plenty to explore before moving on entirely.
It’s a good call. Wunderland shows Lally to be an imaginative writer of feeling and substance.
Rónán Hession’s latest novel is Panenka
