IN A bleak sanatorium in 1960s Ireland, a group of tubercular patients survive through contingency relationships - a bit of snatched sex here, a bartered Woodbine there. Outcast by family and friends in an era when T.B. carried the stigma of poverty and the fear of contagion, they adapt easily to their loveless refuge.
When Irene Rivers is removed after six years by marriage to a middle aged mammy's boy, all she knows is that marriage is followed by motherhood. Stanley can't cope with sex but Irene needs a baby, so she goes to a hospital and steals one.
The early sequences are outstanding, from the time the monstrous bus deposits her at the forbidding sanatorium, Granitefield, on a wet November day (Morrissy has a particular gift for investing inanimate objects with anarchic and sinister life) to Irene's panicky release from her grim sanctuary. The atmosphere of the place and the time are evoked with an imaginative hand worthy of a Bronte (Granitefield bears some resemblance to Ferndean in Jane Eyre) and we could happily have stayed with this interesting set of characters. After Irene leaves the sanatorium there follows a chilling and moving study of a marriage in which neither partner knows how to relate - but ultimately the novelist evades what she has so painstakingly established.
The novel is divided into three books, each following the story of its principal female characters - Irene, the child she steals and that child's mother. This allows for a startling study of cause and effect but makes for sometimes unsatisfactory reading. On one level the book is a top ranking psychological thriller. Morrissy is mistress of the squeal of tension, and she is skilled at the short, sharp shock. There are no emotional cliche's or pat resolutions. When police find the stolen child the natural mother is merely discommoded; in her mind she has grieved for, and buried, the child. Efforts to erase the trauma from the child's consciousness result in the birth of a ghostly alter ego. There is the feeling here that one is witnessing shocking truths rather than fictional contrivance - but the scenes keeps switching at the moment of crisis and there is a swerve away from emotional confrontation.
A sense of distance is heightened - by the self regarding introspection of the female characters Dull abused Ellen Rivers (mother of Irene) would scarcely have "cursed the folly of loyalty and the uselessness of love". A surreal feeling is introduced by reference to Dublin as a city at war (a war between southsiders and northsiders). This makes for a crowded and occasionally indigestible novel that still leaves the reader not quite satisfied.
Morrissy creates landscapes of great clarity and has the lyrical gift of recreating time or sound in phrases. She describes "the sooty purr of clarinets" and recalls cinema matinees with much used reels where "the huge blue skies of Westerns were flecked with what like the crushed bodies of insects".
Her short stories (A Lazy Eye) brought us a delightfully sullen set of characters whose stubborn inertness set off catastrophic chains of action. In her novel she conveys the vulnerability of inadequate people trying to burrow into some suitable niche in society, hoping for invisibility as they hulk squarely out of round holes. It is a small criticism that she has tried to do too much at once and a dazzling display signifies less than its parts. But it is a formidable first novel.