This is the story, told with considerable warmth, of Minnie O'Brien and her small-holding of five fields near the one-street village of Drumhallow, Co Westmeath. The village consisted of a single street, a great burly nothingness of a street: the world passed through it without bothering to give it a glance. To the inhabitants, though, the village was a metropolis. There each day it breathed silent planning, breathing and gasping as though a length of purposeful wire kept the houses tied together in a single strand of woes and wishes.
Minnie has three children. Brendan becomes a bishop and is fond of the drink. Sheila is elevated (if that's the word) to middle-class, unhappy affluence in Blackrock. The youngest, Frankie, becomes a wanderer, "a nobody in amongst the masses of nobodies". Throughout her long, widowed life Minnie keeps a vigil, and possession of her fields, for the return of Frankie. When he does come home, it is too late for anything but a burial.
It is a simple story. How, then, do you account for the length of the book? Minnie marries her Peter on May 18th, 1922, and spends the honeymoon in a pre-U2 Clarence Hotel on the Dublin quays. She lives into her 80s so that her story coincides with the story of this State. But there is very little conventional, historical detail in the novel. The writing merely glances off such detail, like the fleeting glimpse of Liam Mellows with two of his IRA comrades filling a bottle of milk at the farm before taking to their heels again.
Nor is there a great deal of social history, although, through Brendan and Frankie, we get something of the once fashionable Irish diaspora. For all the incidental details, of everything from Wills Wild Woodbines to Morning Ireland, the true narrative energy of the book is not sociological, it is linguistic. Everything emerges out of, and is shaped by, language.
The length of the book, then, is partly due to extended descriptions, particularly of rural rituals, like the stunning opening set-piece of Minnie and her three small children churning butter. The decline of the dairy, from opulent crocks of butter to mildew and rust, marks one of several time-shifts in the book, shifts that are sometimes bewildering, it has to be said.
BUT the bulk of the book is also due to the fact that language is constantly being observed in the process of creating and making knowable the world about us. Much of this is concentrated on the daily routines of an old woman alone with her dog with whom she has long conversations. In effect, Minnie and her world become an invention of language and the book is going to be judged on whether or not this act of verbal conjuring is successful. Certainly, the wordplay, the sheer pleasure of the writer in this process, yields up many incidental pleasures for the reader. "It was duskiss by the time they set out for home." : "The pony's racket was wrong. Saturday, Saturday, Saturday was the rhythm of her gait as she trotted along the road."
The same wordplay may test the patience of other readers. There is no doubt that, at times, it simply doesn't come off, not just in the straining of meanings but in the contortion of the syntax, the pursuit of words beyond what is demanded by the event itself. It is difficult to know, for instance, how the language is advancing our sense of what is happening in a description like this one:
It was a night in druid entity, God thin-looking in the bed, avoidance His game, the October month well near gone, when Minnie O'Brien's priest-son harumscarum like staggered to her bedside.
Still, it is important to acknowledge a writer who takes such risks. We live in the Age of the Journalist, and Gradgrind has returned in triumph. The traditional distinction between fiction and factuality has become increasingly blurred. A novel like this one, which goes beyond mere sociology, is to be valued for its celebration of the way in which the imagination changes things.
Thomas Kilroy is a playwright and novelist Christopher Nolan interview: page 11