Fiction: Mia Gallagher's first novel Hellfire is as dark as its title suggests.
The novel opens with the release of Lucy Dolan, the novel's protagonist and narrator, from prison, and then moves into a retrospective narrative through which she attempts to better understand the realities of her life, ravaged by heroin addiction and violence. Through Lucy, Gallagher tells a tale of inner-city Dublin in the 1980s and 1990s, marked by gangland feuds, pimp- controlled prostitution, drug dealing, drug addiction and the beginnings of the HIV/Aids epidemic.
Hellfire is a work with a strong social conscience, forcing the reader to face up to the blindspots of Celtic Tiger Ireland - its neglected underbelly - which is dressed over and covered up by the preferred images of economic prosperity and material wealth.
However, while it's written in the first-person narrative of Lucy's voice, a phonetic lyricism of inner-city Dublin dialect, Gallagher is not attempting to speak for the people of the area in their entirety. The importance of telling the stories of the marginalised is matched with a similar emphasis on the subjective nature of all storytelling. This is drawn out through Lucy's attempts at remembering. The novel is addressed to Lucy's childhood friend, Nayler, and tries to make sense of an horrific event which took place at the Hellfire Club in the Dublin mountains 13 years previously. However, what becomes clear is that there can be no one definitive truth attributed to that eventful night. Instead, Lucy's memories - and the way in which she organises them - create a story which can help to heal and mend her, but there will always be other stories on the borders, other possible meanings and interpretations: "The truth . . . is like the dance a the seven veils - only there's way more than seven."
Gritty realism interjected with poetic surrealism is not an easy stylistic feat. However, this is something that Hellfire does effortlessly, expertly creating a fictional landscape in which consciousness and unconsciousness are interspersed and differentiations between the "real" and the "unreal" are frequently blurred. This stylistic feature of the novel operates not only to place emphasis on the subjective nature of truth and memory, but also allows access to the complex workings of a young woman's mind. Such a complex examination of the feminine psyche makes it imperative to place this novel in the context of contemporary Irish women's fiction. Furthermore, notwithstanding differences in subject matter and theme, Gallagher's stylistic experimentation positions her more specifically in the company of contemporary Irish writer Anne Enright, whose work similarly resists narrative realism and plays with language and form.
This is an excellent debut novel from a writer who excels at both storytelling and the management of narrative form. The maintaining of a unique and innovative balance between these two elements (particularly given the scale of the work, which spans more than 650 pages) explicitly signals the extent of Gallagher's expertise.
Although long, this book never tires. The reader is swept up in an exhilarating narrative and stylistic journey, never knowing where the next page might lead.
Claire Bracken is currently researching contemporary Irish women's writing and film
Hellfire By Mia Gallagher Penguin Ireland, 658 pp. £12.99