MARTINA EVANS's second novel has a curiously old fashioned painting of a young girl on its jacket, the pale ivory tones and long hair suggesting that what is between the covers belongs to another, much earlier decade or even century - which is odd considering that Evans has chosen to write about a young punkette from Cork, describing not embroidery and high tea but a lifestyle of cider, prescription drugs and dingy flats.
Maeve is in her first year of a science degree in UCC but the smell of formaldehyde makes her feel sick and she much prefers to spend her time eating chocolate and drawing pictures of camels with colouring pencils. The novel takes us through some familiar ground; her friend Ger's affair with a married man and subsequent pregnancy; Maeve's experience of first love; working holidays and some topics refreshingly unusual in an Irish novel seances, pill popping and mindless vandalism.
There is a need for more books like this about Ireland, books that show there was life outside London - and indeed, life outside Dublin - in the early 1980s, unfortunately, The Glass Mountain, although a good idea in theory, fails to pull it off in practice. Maeve and her friends are supposedly punks but even allowing for Evans's constant play with the idea that Maeve does not know what this means ("Spitting phlegm at people was called gobbing. It was a part of punk that I found hard to accept so I tried to pretend it wasn't happening"), the depiction of the punk movement in Cork is unconvincing.
Slang words such as "wrecky" for vandalism and "pondies" for slimming pills are used excessively as a certificate of authenticity, yet for a book that is about a group of punks, mention of music and bands is shockingly absent. Maeve, as an unlikely punk who dislikes violence, could be a strong heroine but there is a curious flatness and lack of perception about the portrayal of her character that makes events and realisations unlikely and uneven.
In Evans's previous novel, Midnight Feast, a nightmarish tale of two convent school girls' descent into life threatening bulimia, this device of the innocent narrator was used to great effect. There, the lack of self insight on the part of Grace, the narrator, communicated the irrationality of childhood fears and passions as well as the incomprehensible affliction of eating disorders. In The Glass Mountain, Maeve is presented to us as supposedly sensitive, which makes her lack of perception about herself and others vaguely irritating, and results not in the complexity often afforded by an unreliable and translucent narrator, but in an implausibility of character and situation.
The problem does not lie in bad writing on Evans's part; indeed, some of her descriptions positively glisten - "The pall of smoke stirred and drifted, it couldn't settle its borders - but rather in the fact that the novel betrays signs of a confused purpose. Much of it is written in the naive manner popular in novels of small town life - "Carl kept getting me on my own and saying that the time for sex was at hand. It was awfully exciting with his long legs everywhere but I was scared I'd get pregnant" - and this slightly breathy, permanently embarrassed style fits with the wistful young girl on the cover, but not with Evans's chosen material.
In setting herself the task of giving voice to a vaguely dispossessed generation or group - the shame faced, middle class punks who vandalise telephone boxes out of a need for aggression and anarchy - Martina Evans failed to adjust her tone from that which she used to capture so vividly schoolgirl angst in Midnight Feast. The result is a novel that has the potential to be excellent but fails to convince.
