When the taut, English Julia and her feckless Irish husband Brian set out from London with their small son, Sam, nothing about the routine of setting burglar alarms and cancelling milk prepares them for the bleak torment that is to follow. The reader must know, can't help but know, that this tense middle-class idyll is about to be to cruelly interrupted, so precisely delineated are O'Riordan's opening chapters.
She plays on our expectations with a couple of red herrings, before delivering the blow that leaves the Donovans in Ireland without their son. From there on, The Boy in the Moon is a study in reconciliation. It is much to Kate O'Riordan's credit that she does not concentrate solely on the slow odyssey that Julia must make before she can forgive her husband for a moment of fatal carelessness. This journey towards healing may seem the centre of the narrative, but as Julia's point of refuge is her father-in-law Jeremiah's isolated farm in the West of Ireland, Brian's convoluted past is simultaneously unravelled. It is an irony well recognised by O'Riordan that Julia's very British, repressed manner, while at odds with her husband's easy ways, finds its perfect counterpart in the silence and moods of his father, Jeremiah. There are many different silences in this book, silences of the living and silences of the grave. There are old and untold stories of Jeremiah's cruelty, unspoken doubts of parentage, constant failures in communication and the long-ago deaths of both Brian's mother and his twin. It is when Julia finds the journal of Margaret, the mother, that she begins to become intrigued for the first time with her husband's past, although the journal offers up little more than lists and recipes and odd, censored glimpses of an unspoken history.
Meanwhile, Brian is falling apart in Britain. Surrounded by a parallel isolation to his wife's, that of suburban London, he too retreats into the past. Initially a recalling of childhood and its hardships, his story is a voyage of discovery equal to his wife's. But while the past grudgingly yields up a storyline to Julia, it is pushing up further occasions of guilt for Brian. In the final, dramatic chapters it is only her detective work that can offer him any chance of survival and peace with himself.
The opening pages of The Boy in the Moon present us with a Julia emotionally close only to her son, while her husband is a man she irritates by calling him "Darling" and wrenching open doors. The masterfully achieved subtext to the book is Julia's transformation into a woman aware of subtlety and the importance of that which is unsaid. It says much for O'Riordan's perception, and also, perhaps, about her own experiences of growing up in the West and living in London, that this new perception is not achieved through an idealised exposure to rural life.
Although O'Riordan initially seems to be pursuing a hackneyed notion that the grim, earthy silences of Jeremiah's farm will be enough to heal Julia, she quickly demonstrates that, on the contrary, such cruel silences in Brian's past and in Julia's own controlled demeanour are ultimately more damaging than therapeutic. The finale is as dramatic as it is revealing; this is a novel that leaves you turning back pages as you attempt to piece together a satisfyingly knotty plot.
Yet while Kate O'Riordan's eye for the intricacies of a good story is splendid, the real strength of The Boy in the Moon lies in the gradual awakenings and epiphanies of her well-turned characters. She has managed to write a book whose pivotal points are tragedies yet which never descends into the mawkish or the glib, showing a mastery of the empathic rather than the pathetic. I am already looking forward to her next novel.
Louise East is a journalist and critic
