Little picture, big history

FICTION: KEVIN POWERreviews UnspokenBy Gerard Stembridge Old Street, 433pp. £12.99

GERARD STEMBRIDGE'S third novel is an ambitious and somewhat uneven performance, full of human warmth and social detail. It is an old-fashioned kind of book, a sort of subdued, more forgiving Vanity Fairwith an Irish historical setting. Stembridge may be writing about Ireland under a Fianna Fáil government, during a period of economic growth, over a decade of increasing liberalisation and prosperity – but don't panic: Unspokenisn't a Celtic Tiger novel. It's about Ireland in the 1960s, and it's a proper saga.

There is no central character as such, but the narrative strands gather themselves around a working-class Limerick family, the Strongs. The opening sentence alerts us to Stembridge’s desire to fuse the personal with the political: “Ann Strong did not vote in the presidential election because, on that June evening, her waters broke.” Fonsie, Ann’s husband, is a coalman, who will eventually see his fortunes transformed as the nation is opened up to new business. As he waits in the delivery room Fonsie muses on the other fathers who wait with him: “Five children would . . . grow up sharing an important detail of their lives. Would their paths ever cross?”

Well, yes and no. Unspokenoffers no great, sweeping historical narrative to hang on to. Throughout its length it remains steadily fixed on what you might call little-picture history, the tiny ways in which lives glance off other lives. The cumulative effect may be panoramic but the page-by-page focus is intimate and calm. Stembridge builds his picture of a changing country scene by scene, as it were brick by brick, so that the novel's true shape only starts to become visible about halfway through.

This is, of course, the method of the dramatist or film-maker, and Stembridge has form in both worlds. From his role as writer and producer on the seminal RTÉ radio series Scrap Saturday(which he developed with the late Dermot Morgan), Stembridge moved on to write and direct plays such as The Gay Detective(1996) and Denis and Rose(2002), and to make films including Guiltrip(1995), About Adam(2000) and Black Day at Blackrock(2001).

Throughout his career Stembridge has displayed the instincts of a popular entertainer, but his entertainments have generally been tempered by a journalistic urge to seize and reflect upon the manners and moods of his time. About Adam gleamed with the boutique splendour of the first years of the property bubble, but also, beneath the dodgy Dublin accents, subtly exposed the bright-eyed emptiness of the period. That Was Then(Abbey Theatre, 2003) was ahead of the game in offering a satire of working-class property developers made good.

He moved into fiction with According to Luke(2006) and Counting Down(2009). The first of these deals in mildly comic terms with the family of a corrupt Fianna Fáil politician, and is hampered by its over-reliance on contemporary news stories as trendy narrative markers, perhaps a consequence of its original serialisation in the Dubliner. Counting Down, about a man who buys a mysterious clock that ticks away the seconds until his death, never quite escapes the constraints of its Twilight Zone-like premise.

Unspokenis a different sort of book, conceived along the lines of a Victorian epic. It is divided into 10 sections covering 1959 to 1969, one for each year, and follows a varied assortment of characters: the ageing, increasingly blind Éamon de Valera during his first term as president; Gavin Bloom, a homosexual floor manager at the brand-new Teilifís Éireann; cameraman Baz Molloy; architect Corman Kiely; a young and rapacious Charles J Haughey (known as "the Lizard"); and, most movingly, Dom, or Donogh O'Malley, Limerick man and minister for education under Seán Lemass, who made education free for Irish children. And representing the plain people of Ireland, there is the Strong family.

Through the not-especially-grandiose experiences and reflections of these characters the larger picture comes into focus: Unspoken is about the arrival of modernity, new Ireland versus old. Bit by bit, the 20th century takes over and Dev’s vision, literally and figuratively, ebbs away. Television, pop music, Vatican II, foreign investment, a housing boom: each year some new thing chips away at the comely-maidens-dancing utopia envisioned by the founder of Fianna Fáil.

This is very well done, despite the occasional cliche (“dancing eyes”, “watched him like a hawk”) and tautology (“he eavesdropped surreptitiously”). The book’s length and steadfast devotion to the ordinary make for occasional longueurs – do we really need to read the whole of Donogh O’Malley’s speech to the journalists’ union? And the lack of a central narrative line beyond the general drift of events can leave the later sections of the novel feeling rather loose and baggy. But generally Stembridge’s narrative skill keeps things clipping along, and his ability to summon the atmosphere of a cabinet meeting (where pipes are smoked as “symbols of unhurried intelligence”) or to put us inside Dev’s mind as he addresses the US congress offers many pleasures.

Towards the end of the book Baz Molloy sets out to make a documentary about modern Ireland. As he watches his assembled footage he notes that it offers "less a narrative than a feeling, an atmosphere". This is a clue to Stembridge's method in Unspoken. He is reminding us that the larger moods of history begin in the small moods of individual moments. And he has done an excellent job of capturing both.

KEVIN POWERis a novelist and teaches creative writing at University College Dublin. He is the author of Bad Day in Blackrock, published by Pocket Books