Two Moons by Jennifer Johnston Review 232pp, 14.99 in UK
Three generations of women in a comfortable house overlooking the sea at Killiney: Mimi, past eighty, sits in the garden or watches television; Grace, a statuesque fiftysomething, works as an actress at the Abbey; Polly, young, home from London for a few days in the company of a young man with whom she is madly in love. In other hands it might turn into a family saga or a soft-centred romance, but Jennifer Johnston spins her yarn into a shimmering confection whose surface limpidity conceals layer upon layer of narrative meaning, yet whose overall effect is of simplicity, lightness and ease. How does she do it?
Partly through the feather-light application of ironic humour, of which the opening scene is a delightful example. An old lady seated in a garden, surrounded by roses, her hands folded in her lap - but this particular old lady, we discover, is engrossed in conversation with a man who turns out to be an angel named Bonifacio di Longaro. Born - if angels can be born - in 15th-century Italy, Bonifacio is more impish than pious, encouraging the frail and supposedly housebound Mimi, in due course, to take a taxi into town and buy a pair of horrendously expensive Gucci ankle boots to replace her sensible flat shoes. Partly through the shrewdly-shaded portrayals of the three ages of woman; the youthful Polly is a vague blur in the foreground, while Grace moves about in the middle distance, the most vivid of the three but also the most undefined, caught as she is between her daughter's future and her mother's past, her mind full of Shakespeare - it's no coincidence, surely, that she's playing Gertrude, the most un-motherly of mothers, during the course of the novel - and Mimi, though she scarcely moves at all, dips and soars through her memories in her conversations with Bonifacio. Partly through the clever use of startlingly focused cameos - the cleaning woman, the gay actor friend, the alcoholic father, deceased.
And partly, of course, through sheer skill with words. There is no flashiness, no wastage - everything counts. Mimi is funny, but she is also bitter, and bitterly aware of the ravages of age. "She paused for a moment and a shadow crossed her face as she groped for his name. `Forgive me. I never thought I would come to this, searching for the names of old friends. Charles.' She spoke the word with triumph." Grace is ravaged by guilt - guilt at the way she has raised her daughter, guilt at the way she treats her mother - but she sums up her parents' marriage in a single sentence of devastating clarity; "They were both so diminished by despair."
What of the story itself, then? Deceptively simple. Daughter arrives with boyfriend; boyfriend is bowled over by mother. Grandmother's angelic messenger, mean while, is gently but firmly forcing her to confront the unspoken disappointments of her own life. Will they all live happily ever after? Not likely - but I'm not giving anything away, either, except to say that whatever you're thinking is probably wrong. This is a novel of immense sophistication, familiar yet distant as the moon of the title
Arminta Wallace is an Irish Times staff journalist