In 2015, Claire Kilroy published an essay in the Irish arts anthology Winter Papers, F for Phone, in which she described how the birth of her son, Lawrence, three years earlier had robbed her of the ability to write: “Writing used to be the answer to all my problems – it enabled me to make something out of the bad things in my life, to use them – but now I can no longer write. So I can no longer fix my life.”
Finally, after an 11-year gap since her last book, she has found a way to use those “angry few years”, transmuting them into the tour-de-force of her fifth novel. Soldier Sailor is an astonishing high-wire act: a narrative at once raw and polished, brutally funny and quietly devastating, every sentence a precision-guided missile to the undefended core of any reader who has endured the dislocation of early motherhood. And it is specifically “motherhood”; the battle-scarred Soldier of the title is the unnamed female narrator who discovers, on becoming a mother, that the equality she thought she shared with her husband was only a veneer. “I was just a woman! How had this not registered before? A woman was of less value in society than a man.” She resents him for being able to maintain his life outside the confines of child rearing. “Which is not to say that your father was my world, but that he was free to roam in my world, which we should now call his world, or perhaps the world, an adult place from which I’d been banished. Now I lived in your world. It was small.”
The book is an extended confession addressed to the narrator’s son, whom she calls Sailor – an attempt to make sense of the borderline insanity of those early months. “I almost left you once,” she says, then corrects herself: “A bad confession is worse than none at all. I did leave you.” This opening sequence is a punch to the gut: in the throes of postnatal crisis, she describes leaving her new baby swaddled on a cliff top while she sets out to take her own life, believing it’s best for him. Later, returning home after an almost supernatural intervention, the most poignant detail: “There was a letter in the swaddle. A watermark of tears on the envelope. The mother had wanted the baby to some day see those tears and forgive her. I opened the stove and tossed the letter into the fire.”
Mortality, its proximity to birth and motherhood, is watermarked through the novel, as the ultimate equaliser and the ultimate expression of inequality: “Tell me, men: when were you last split open from the inside?” Militaristic images abound: she speaks of the potential for violence that motherhood ignites, the urge to kill (others, yourself) to protect your child.
There is a visceral quality to Kilroy’s writing; she captures the epic magnitude of mother love – the terrible, mind-bending realisation that you will one day be separated by death – and the grinding drudgery of just getting through the days. That she can render new what has been so often documented is testament to the originality of her prose, which she makes appear effortless: “You tore off your bib and cast it to the floor like a man quitting his job”; “Little kids bolted around in all directions, their skulls narrowly missing one another. It was the Hadron Collider in there.”
Kilroy ended the essay F for Phone with the words “Lawrence, I am back.” Soldier Sailor is the dispatch she brought with her, poetry mined from the blood and dirt of the trenches.
• Soldier Sailor by Claire Kilroy is published by Faber (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
