Nothing On Earth
By Conor O’Callaghan
(Transworld, €16.99 p/b)
A ghost estate in the middle of nowhere; an unreliable narrator in the
shape of a priest under suspicion: these are the standard themes of post-boom,
post-clerical child abuse Ireland, out of which poet Conor O’Callaghan, whose
debut novel this is, has woven something quite extraordinary.
During a sweltering summer – the
hottest May on record – a makeshift family move into the show house on a
far-from-finished estate, on a rent-to-by (as opposed to buy-to-let) basis they
agree with dodgy builder Flood. There’s Paul, who cycles everyday to his nearby
computer software factory job; his partner (are they married?) Helen; her
sister Martina (it transpires that they are twins), who goes everywhere they
go; and Paul and Helen’s twelve-year-old daughter, also named Helen (or is
she?), otherwise referred to as ‘The Girl’. They are recently returned
emigrants, from Germany. The girl calls Helen Mutti, her English is stilted, with ‘… a sort of freeze-dried
quality…as if her every phrase had only just been taken out of the vacuum
packing it had lain in for years, and was found to be almost too well
preserved.’ Their only neighbours are the elderly Harry and Sheila. Marcus,
Flood’s nephew, turns up of an evening as night watchman. Martina takes to
slipping out, keeping him company in his portacabin, until he knocks off at
6am. Then, one by one, over the course of that long hot summer, each of the
adults goes missing.
The previous sentence hardly counts
as a spoiler, given the noncommittal way information is slowly and
insubstantially revealed in this radically enigmatic text. Because the girl
turns up distraught at the door of the priest, in the opening pages, both
terrified and terrifying, telling him ‘My papa is gone too’, we are already
prepared for the worst. Yet there is worse to come. Everything is suffused with
an air of dread and impending doom. The glancing early reference to Kubrick’s The Shining is an apt signpost.
Most of the narrative concerning
the domestic relations of the family is based on what the girl tells the priest
that evening, but is he to be trusted? He doesn’t even seem to trust himself,
and already feels guilty as soon as the girl enters his orbit. He has
previously made an effort to call on the house, at Sheila’s behest after the
mother’s disappearance, but is conscious only of his own marginality and
superfluousness. ‘They were tomorrow’s young, with their worldwide webs and
their several languages. The last thing they wanted was yesterday’s man on
their doorstep, preaching ancient, hollow words. They weren’t part of the
congregation.’ Yet he seems to be a
decent man, even if the police are sceptical.
After Helen vanishes, Martina
leaves the factory to look after the girl. They sunbathe topless everyday, as
if on a mission, in the backgarden. When Martina too is not to be found, Paul
neglects to report it, not wanting to bring any more attention on himself and
his daughter. They go for a macabre dinner at the house of Slattery and his
wife Hazel, the local squire (his fortune apparently made in dog food) who sold
the land to Flood (now absconded to Portugal). Then Paul is made redundant, and
bills go unpaid. Water and electricity are cut off. Then he dematerialises too.
In twenty-odd years of reviewing,
this has been one of the most difficult to write, because it is hard to convey adequately
the unsettling atmosphere the novel creates. The nearest correlatives would be:
early Ian McEwan, particularly The Cement
Garden; Neil Jordan’s The Dream of a
Beast; John Banville’s The Newton
Letter; or some of the late J. G. Ballard’s suburban dystopias. While it
certainly has antecedents in Gothic literature, its contemporaneity makes it
feel almost sui generis. Like many
great works, it could so easily have all gone wrong if it hadn’t been done
exactly right. All that can be done is to give it the highest recommendation:
read it, and find out for yourself.
