Donal Ryan’s latest novel is a book of opposing forces. It begins with an ending – the abrupt loss of a character we have only just met – yet concludes with a hope for the people he left behind. Between those events lies a coming-of-age story that explores the challenges of growing up in a tight rural community in 1980s Ireland, and the broader landscape of prejudice, misogyny and family conflict.
Ryan won the Guardian first book award in 2013 for The Spinning Heart, set in rural Ireland after the collapse of the Celtic Tiger. His seventh novel follows the lives of four generations of the Aylwards, a family of strong Irish women whose men have either died or absconded. They gather around the kitchen table to smoke and talk and drink tea, and in the process help us understand our own lives just that little bit better. Nana is at the head of this table: a woman who has buried two of her sons, yet whose wry observations provide much of the humour. Opposite Nana is her widowed daughter-in-law Eileen, and loitering in the doorway is our narrator, Eileen’s young daughter Saoirse (a name Eileen worries over: “if she ever goes to America the Yanks won’t have a clue how to pronounce it”), eavesdropping on a life she has yet to understand.
There are few men in fatherless Saoirse’s life, and the ones who do inhabit it are not drawn favourably. Her uncles Chris and Paudie are weak and foolish. Her mother’s younger brother Richard is more sinister. Due to Eileen having “shamed” her family and its traditional farming community, contact with her relatives is rare and fractured. It’s only when a battle begins to rage for the inheritance of Dirt Island – a narrow strip of land adjacent to Eileen’s childhood home – that the details of that estrangement become clear. Saoirse and her mother must fight for Dirt Island, but also against the patriarchy surrounding it. We negotiate these battles alongside Saoirse, as we learn that Eileen is both the subject of the book’s title and the scandal of the village. “Did you know they have whole rosary meetings given over to talking about your mother?” Saoirse’s friend Breedie tells her.
This wonderful humour punctuates Ryan’s novel, and thankfully so, because on the journey towards Saoirse’s adulthood and in the war for Dirt Island we are drawn into dark territory of grief, infertility, mental illness, suicide and rape. From the unexpected turn of Saoirse’s own life, to the beat of the drum her uncle Paudie hears, and the masked men lining the churchyard in their black berets and sunglasses, this story does not shy away from grim reality.
Yet as ever, Ryan’s writing is so musical, so easily heard, that your eyes will dance through its pages. “She saw her mother’s lonely back and thin arms with their sharp elbows and felt a surge of sadness and love so strong that it winded her.” And just when you least expect it, a quiet brutality will make you put down the book and pause. These moments, very often involving characters on the periphery of the story – the lad who “strings himself up” in his father’s hayshed, the girl who walks to church bruised and bloodied behind her brothers and widowed father, and “wore these injuries apologetically, as though she knew the discomfort they caused” – are delivered with a rare skill, a kind of devastating elegance.
Within each short chapter, filled with compassion and cruelty, lie more opposites: fragility and strength; joy and despair; a family that lives with silence, yet throws words around “like fistfuls of confetti”. But the wonderful thing about opposites is that eventually they will find each other again. Dirt Island may be just “a bit of soggy fucking grass and a dirty pond”, but as developers cast their eye and its true value is revealed, Saoirse and Eileen must prove that it’s not only parcels of land that can be more important than they seem. “We’re all being broken down piece by piece back towards the earth from where we rose,” says Nana, and as you reach the final pages of this story, as one generation ends and a new generation finds its place in the world, and its own puzzles to solve, you realise that behind the scenes, Ryan has drawn the perfect circle.
• The Queen of Dirt Island is published by Doubleday (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
