I won’t say that the day of the Scandinavian crime novel has passed, nor that of the Scottish, but I will say that it is high noon for the Irish novel of crime and corruption. Set in both the South and the North, from postwar to the present, the books share a contemporary mood that owes everything to the various species of villainy and betrayal that brought down the island’s economy and put paid to the social and moral hegemony of the Catholic Church. A fine dyspepsia pervades the novels of Stuart Neville, Gene Kerrigan, Arlene Hunt, Benjamin Black, and Adrian McKinty — to mention only a few. Now here is Lisa McInerney, whose debut novel, The Glorious Heresies, won this year’s Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction (formerly the Orange Prize). McInerney was previously best known as “The Sweary Lady” for her blog, called, if you will pardon me for saying so, “The Arse End of Ireland.” (Certain admirable remains of its ten-year existence may be found at http://ift.tt/2aP9paR).
The Glorious Heresies is set in Cork city of recent years, its plot launched by the accidental killing of a domestic intruder. Sixty-year-old Maureen Phelan has smashed in the man’s head with a souvenir stone stamped with the image of the Virgin and Child. Maureen, as it happens, is no stranger to the crushing power of the Church. Unmarried, she bore her son, crime boss Jimmy Phelan, forty years ago, escaping by only a decade being confined to one of the penal “homes” for unwed mothers, the now notorious Magdalene Laundries. Still, there was punishment enough, in Maureen’s having been forced to give up the infant Jimmy to be raised by her poisonously pious parents. Now he stands before her — the criminal product of a stifling upbringing — called in by his mother to deal with this corpse that is leaking blood and brains over her kitchen floor. Ruthless and hardened though he is, Jimmy is nonplussed: ” ‘Clean up after your mother offs someone’ was a much more significant task than he’s ever have thought to factor in.”
He hands the job over to one Tony Cusack, dipsomaniac father of six, whose wife was killed when she tore off in the family car in a drunken rage. Tony, alas, knows the dead man and lets his name slip. That would not be so bad, as the victim was a drug addict about whom the authorities could care less — except in this instance it leads to trouble in a highly circumlocutory way. Other characters become implicated in one way or another. There is Tony’s son, Ryan, a nice fifteen-year-old schoolboy when we meet him — who also deals drugs. He is in love with his girlfriend and schoolmate, Karine but has caught the fancy of the woman next door, who is some decades his senior. She plies him with booze and seduces him — which is to say, given his age, rapes him — much to Ryan’s continuing mental and spiritual distress. Also at large is a cocaine-addicted prostitute, Georgie Fitzsimons, the girlfriend of the dead man. She keeps trying to get herself straightened out, but, as with most of the people in this book, it’s a losing game.
The plot, loose in the joints, meanders about for five years: People do this, people do that; lives intersect here and there and then head off in different directions — sometimes fatally. It’s all pretty haphazard. On the other hand, the individual scenes are excellently done and convey the disappointed, dead-end feeling that pervaded the land in the last several years. McInerney portrays the lot of the losers with excruciating verisimilitude, most especially that of poor, no-hoper Georgie — and often with humor, too, as in the case of the alcoholic waster Tony Cusack. Back from court-mandated rehabilitation (after smashing his neighbor’s window), we find him forced to look for a job as a condition of his release. He is assisted by one of his computer-savvy children to look at job postings: “Between them they figured out which posts were worth procuring rejection letters from. Sometimes he got an email back that thanked him for his efforts but denied the existence of suitable positions. When he was so blessed he showed them to his probation officer. The job hunt was going well.”
And then there is Maureen Phelan, the pivot around which the plot rambles. It is she who expresses the anger that so many Irish — women in particular — feel toward the Church, the revelation of its crimes and cover-ups made all the more enraging in the light of its history of sanctimonious and punitive despotism. Railing against the cruel treatment of pregnant young women such as she was, Maureen gives an old priest a piece of her mind: “The most natural thing in the world is giving birth; you built your whole religion around it. And yet you poured pitch on girls like me and sold us into slavery and took our humanity from us.” The novel ends on a note of redemption that, if not entirely credible, offers at least kindness in a world of souls starved for it.
The Barnes & Noble Review http://ift.tt/2aD1oSU
Sig Nordal 