All We Shall Know
By Donal Ryan
(Transworld, €16.99 p/b)
In his new novel, Donal Ryan attempts to do something male writers essay at
their peril: to write from the first person point of view in a female voice. Of
course, there have been notable achievements among men pretending to be women, perhaps
most famously James Joyce in petticoats as Molly Bloom. Not that the praise for
JJ’s attempt has always been universal: ‘ “Yes” is what men always want women
to say,’ being a favourite line of attack among feminist literary critics,
highlighting the propensity for male wish-fulfillment. Then, in an instance of
being shot by both sides, there is also the risk of being accused by the lads
of merely wanting to score male-feminist brownie points with the ladies. All
this preamble by way of suggesting that the success or failure of Ryan’s
venture depends largely on how well you think he inhabits the mind and body of
his anti-heroine, a diarist with the unlikely name of Melody Shee.
Melody is in a bit of a pickle,
suicidally so. She tells us, by way of introduction: ‘Martin Toppy is the son
of a famous Traveller and the father of my unborn child. He’s seventeen, I’m
thirty-three. I was his teacher. I’d have killed myself by now if I was brave
enough.’ She’s married, and husband Pat doesn’t take the news too well, even if
she strives to ameliorate it by telling him the father is someone she met on
the internet who she had an affair with. She’s had several miscarriages, and
Pat has had a vasectomy to save her any more trouble. He moves back to his
parents’.
Like Anna Karenina, like Emma
Bovary, Melody is a malcontent, and chaffs under the constraints of quotidian
marriage. Pat’s an ordinary guy, a hurler, an electrician, the only boy she
ever kissed (until Martin Toppy). (On a pedantically realist note, Pat is
described as wearing a Liverpool jersey at one point, and a Chelsea shirt a
hundred pages later, which doesn’t do him any favours: as every bloke knows,
you never change your team.) She’s an educated girl, she did English and
History at Limerick University. They are trapped in the endless cycle of an
abusive, destructive relationship.
Ryan takes a further risk by making
his protagonist a not very nice person. This trait is made most manifest in how
she treated her school friend Breedie Flynn, whom she initially befriended but
then betrayed, because she had to get in with the cool girls in school in order
to get to Pat, and Breedie wasn’t cool. It also seems a tad capricious, if not
downright hypocritical, that she is put out on discovering that Pat has been
going to prostitutes, when she hasn’t – as American parlance would have it – been
‘putting out’ for him herself.
Ryan’s account of Melody’s attempt
to establish herself in a journalistic career illustrates how Melody’s variety
of feminism does not sit well with the more herd-like elements of the
sisterhood: ‘I wrote a searing article on inverted sexism as a trope in
advertising. It was published in a broadsheet supplement, and when I looked at
the online edition there was a stream of comments beneath it and my stomach
burnt with the excitement of it all and I waded into them and saw myself being
attacked and I mounted a defence of my position and I gloried in my new-found
notoriety and I railed against this narrow, straitened, un-nuanced, reactionary
brand of feminism, and declared myself to be a proponent of the purest from of
equality, and I was so happy with myself, and I was never asked to write for
that paper again.’ She is nothing if not single-minded and independent.
It’s as well that she is befriended
by Mary Crothery, a young Traveller woman who has been ostracised by her own
family, having been returned by her erstwhile husband’s family for the awful
crime of being barren. This bond makes possible Melody’s final, moving act of
redemption.
Aside from the sexual politics
involved, how well you take to this book will also hinge on how accurately you
think Ryan handles the representation of the vicious and violent tribalism of
Traveller mores.
Believable female character or
flimsy male construct? Honest portrayal of the harshness of Traveller life, or
typical stereotyping of an already marginalised community? Your judgment of the
verisimilitude, or even the fact that you are judging in terms of
verisimilitude will, I suspect, depend on what area of the ideological spectrum
you inhabit. Or, perhaps more fundamentally, on whether or not you are a woman,
and on whether or not you are a Traveller.
No comments:
Post a Comment