Now that Northern Ireland’s future is again under serious question, comedy has made its return, and the troubled fictions of the last decade have all had their humorous moments. Sue Divin, Anna Burns, Lucy Caldwell and Louise Kennedy have all written books of such complex attachment that laughter has found its place beside tragedy and revelation. Michelle Gallen’s first novel, Big Girl, Small Town, was part of this rising wave, which cleared the way for new and exciting ways to think about the North, and about fiction. Factory Girls tells its story in capital letters, Gallen’s comic, insightful novel of young women growing up in a northwest border town a relentless, entertaining and sometimes uncomfortable read.
The North has long been known for its unruly humour, comic writing an art of the last resort, as it is in the deadpan prose monologues of Kevin McAleer. One day when McAleer’s scattered writings are collected he will be recognised as an occasional writer equal to his fellow northerner, Brian O’Nolan, who, like McAleer and Gallen, was from Tyrone, the island’s hidden, manic heart. From just up the road, Derry Girls brought McAleer’s art to a global audience thanks to the genius of Lisa McGee, who is one of a generation of Northern women who have transformed how we think about life as it exists in the everyday, beyond protocols and proclamations. All of which is to say the comic novel depends upon perspective and timing. Factory Girls shares brilliantly the tangled stories of young women in a struggling provincial town. It is less sure how to integrate these stories into the historical moment that underpins them.
Factory Girls has three main characters, Maeve Murray, Aoife O’Neill and Caroline Jackson. Maeve is the novel’s centre of energy, and Gallen draws her dreams with a wryly honest affection. Aoife is the daughter of one of the town’s better-off families and has her eyes set on Oxford. Failing this, she settles for Trinity, which is a ghost landscape in the novel, a place of escape for generations of Northerners, and often with no return. Caroline has her ambitions too, but settles for life at home with a steady boyfriend, which seems to Maeve a living death. None of which sounds very funny, except that Gallen’s dialogue is so sharply various that the absurdity of the situations her characters find themselves in provides the material for constant farce.
The scene of this debauched drama is the summer between the end of school and the beginning of what comes next. Maeve and Aoife volunteer for work in the local shirt factory, which is the meeting ground between the two religions and a study in the economic injustice that affects the less privileged in relatively equal measure. The factory is run by an English wide boy whose confidence is built on dubious financial foundations. Gallen gathers the threads of these tangled stories skilfully, even if the humour runs a little thin from repetition before the story comes together in its later pages with a flourish.
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Factory Girls is set in the summer months of 1994, an uncertain time between atrocity and ceasefire that is recent enough to make some of the events it describes disturbingly close. Earlier books such as Robert McLiam Wilson’s Eureka Street faced violence in imaginary interludes that had all the weight of reality; more recently, Louise Kennedy’s Trespasses draped its tragic form with a human figure cast in sculpture. In Factory Girls there is history and there is dialogue, and the proximity between the two is unsettling when one is fatal and one ironic, which invites the question as to when the terrible and the traumatic will finally come to rest. Factory Girls is a step towards this settlement, and the haunting presence of Maeve’s lost sister is reminiscent of Majella O’Neill’s missing family in Big Girl, Small Town. But as Jennifer Johnston wrote, and as both books show, there are still many miles to go.
Silence and exile
With so little to laugh about, humour gives voice to energies long diverted into silence and exile. Factory Girls brings a hidden generation of young women to the literary stage, and does so in a flurry of ‘thons’ and ‘skitters’. For all its talk of Brits and Prods, of paramilitaries and protection rackets, Factory Girls is an exploration of the paths that open up before three young women in a society that does not prepare them to take advantage of the choices before them. With no mentors, Maeve stumbles determinedly towards another life in England, and a quirk of the book is that the characters’ attitude to Britain is entirely detached from their dream of London, which is a little republic of its own.
Comedy speaks many truths, and Factory Girls draws the unstable lines of partition in geometries as unsteady as Maeve staggering home from the bar. With a clear eye for the compromises and hypocrisies this condition of living creates, Gallen has written an original and compelling book that describes a pre-ceasefire society that is both distant and familiar. In Big Girl, Small Town, Majella had no intention of leaving her familiar Aghybogey, however little it offered her. In Factory Girls, Maeve counts the days to “the flight of the girls”, the novel a rowdy celebration of Maeve’s desire to live fully on her own terms when everything is against her but their wits.
She does not always get what she wants, and there is more talk of sex in the book than sex itself. That Maeve opens the door to a future beyond small-town life is the true sign that peace has taken hold, and held, her freedom Factory Girls’ last laugh, heard loudly above the Troubles’ deafening rackets.
