Generation by Paula McGrath review: The ties that bind emigrant families

Three generations, 80 years, three continents, multiple narrative perspectives: this is an ambitious debut for any writer.

The novel begins in 1958, when a 25-year-old emigrant leaves for Canada with a tin of Louth earth in his pocket and a job as a miner ahead of him, knowing “nothing about your future, about the woman you will marry, the children you will have”. He represents the first “generation” whose experiences form the starting point for the paths his descendants will follow.

Fifty-two year later, and the next generation takes up the story. His daughter Áine, a recently-divorced single mother in her 30s, who is “washed out to shadow grey” by the demands of work and parenthood, takes her five-year-old daughter Daisy to spend the summer on an organic farm near Chicago. Its pot-smoking owner Joe becomes her lover, but when she finds paedophilic websites on his computer, she and Daisy flee the farm with the help of Mexican migrant worker Carlos.

The scars of this have their own repercussions for Áine and Daisy, so that by 2027 Daisy has renamed herself Bellis and is the one to bring the story full circle. With her grandmother’s encouragement, she returns to Canada to see the mine where her grandfather worked, and in the gnarled hand of an elderly miner discovers the reassurance she craves, “slipping between the present and the past, maybe even the future”.

Entwined through and around the story of this single family are those of many other characters who – as in life itself – add colour and meaning to the existences of those they meet. Each of their tales are told from their own perspective, and add extra layers of depth and meaning to the narrative.

Touching humanity

Particularly memorable are the Israeli child Yehudit, who is transformed into an American wife and piano teacher known as Judy, and Makiko, a Japanese mother hidebound by custom who sacrifices everything for her dream of a concert-pianist son. Perhaps the best-drawn is Carlos, whose love and concern for the wife and daughters he leaves behind in Mexico each spring so he can earn money in Chicago is infused with a touching humanity that makes him stand out among so many differing – and sometimes conflicting – perspectives.

What links each character is McGrath’s fascination with the concept of family and, in particular, the complex relationship between mothers and their children. Judy’s desire for her grown-up son to come and visit – and the manner in which she eagerly “fills the vacant place with enough justifications to make it right” – will strike a chord with many parents, as will Makiko’s sense of bereavement when Kane rejects the path she has laid out for him: “at that moment she knows what it is like to lose a son”.

For McGrath, the modern family is a fragmented entity: not one, but two, husbands leave their wives for pregnant girlfriends, and the ties that endure are not those between partners, but between generations.

Particularly impressive is the skilful way McGrath delineates her characters. The initial story of the unnamed emigrant is told in the second person, conveying a sense of poignancy and nostalgia, and each character is distinguished as much by their idiomatic speech as by their actions. A glass of wine is described as “pouring redemption”, and such imagery reflects McGrath’s love throughout for the resonances of language.

Narrative voices

The use of so many individual perspectives would present a challenge for any writer, but for a debut novelist like McGrath the challenge must have been all the greater. Her fiction and non-fiction have been widely published in journals and anthologies both in Ireland and in Britain, she was shortlisted last year for the Maeve Binchy Travel Award and is clearly a very talented writer. However, the sheer number of narrative voices inevitably begs the question as to whether there is simply too much crammed in a relatively short novel.

This feeling becomes most pronounced during Áine’s story, with the discovery – climactic in any other novel – that she and her daughter are stranded in a paedophile’s house and must escape. The entire sequence, from Áine’s first doubts to their escape, covers just 34 pages, and the need to cover so much ground detracts from an episode that, in another novel, might have formed the dramatic core of the book. Indeed, there is so much potential here that McGrath might easily have filled three novels with the characters she has created.

It seems facile to point out that, had she followed such a course, Generation would have been a very different novel and sacrificed much of its ambition. Mark Richards, editorial director with JM Originals, McGrath's publisher, has said the imprint is "a space where risks can be taken and hunches can be backed, because literary careers make sense over the long-term." Such support for innovation and ambition should be commended – as should McGrath's determination to realise her literary vision.

Freya McClements is an arts journalist