FictionIt's easy to forget now, with so many Irishwomen writing books, that once there were hardly any - and by once I don't mean once upon a time but less than 25 years ago.
Then along came Maeve Binchy.
Her novels, starting with Light A Penny Candle in 1982, touched a chord on two levels. They satisfied a hunger among Irish people to read stories set in a familiar landscape peopled by recognisable characters; and they encouraged writers waiting in the wings who might otherwise have been deterred by the perception that books mean literature as opposed to good storytelling.
Several waves of popular fiction writers have followed in Binchy's wake, with at least one in each wave attracting huge international sales. The most recent example is Cecelia Ahern, whose work has persuaded into bookshops both younger readers and a section of the community not normally given to buying books, and whose revenues provide her publishers with the funds to take a chance on other writers. But much of the confidence among female Irish writers today originates with Binchy.
What readers are buying into with a Binchy book is a unique environment: a world of warmth and compassion in which a kind heart is prized above a pretty face, family life is celebrated and qualities such as decency and initiative are rewarded.
This is the milieu of her latest novel, Whitethorn Woods, the story of the small town of Rossmore where the pace of life is speeding up. A new bypass has been proposed and public opinion is divided because progress will come at the expense of a holy shrine in local woods slated for demolition. The shrine is a well dedicated to St Anne, mother of the Virgin Mary, and for centuries believers (and a few hedging their bets) have been going there to pray for her intercession for a miracle: single women for partners, childless women for babies, sick people for cures. It's a repository for people's hopes, and proof of their faith is found all around the grotto and its apple-cheeked statue of St Anne - looking incongruously like an advertisement for cheese spread. Scattered everywhere are crutches, spectacles, children's bootees and petitions, some even carved on the walls.
The local curate, Fr Flynn, is in a quandary about the well but Rome is giving him no guidance about whether worship there is to be condoned. On the one hand idolatry is frowned upon, but on the other hand any expression of piety in an increasingly secular society should be promoted. Fr Flynn is torn between supporting the bypass, which will rid his parish of this well - smacking of the pagan to him - or opposing it and depriving the faithful of consolation.
Whitethorn Woods is told as a series of standalone short stories with Rossmore and its holy well as their common thread. Sometimes these vignettes and the characters inhabiting them interlink and sometimes their connection is looser.
Binchy has always had a knack for character and here they range from a lazy, complacent doctor who drums an enthusiastic young colleague out of town to an Irish-American who wants to establish a memorial to his emigrant grandfather. Then there's the dying woman who admits to her Filipina nurse that she stole a baby from a pram in Rossmore and raised her as her daughter. It takes a particularly skilful writer to engage the reader's sympathy for such a character without condoning her actions.
These characters speak with their own voices directly off the page. My favourite is Neddy Nolan, good-hearted but a little slow, who can't believe his luck when an attractive teacher agrees to marry him. At his wedding he makes a speech admitting he's not the sharpest knife in the drawer, and she stands up and replies there are so many drawers full of unpleasant, sharp knives you'd be afraid to open them.
And when you think about it, Binchy is absolutely right. Simple, universal truths such as that continue to make her books worth reading.
Martina Devlin is a writer and newspaper columnist. Her most recent book - a memoir, The Hollow Heart - is published by Penguin
Whitethorn Woods By Maeve Binchy Orion Books, 343pp. €22.99