Soldier Sailor by Claire Kilroy: An astute, provocative, intriguing novel about motherhood

Soldier Sailor

Author: Claire Kilroy

ISBN-13: 978-0571381142

Publisher: Faber & Faber

Guideline Price: £16.99

“You open the door and look out into the rain and realise that there is nowhere for you to go; and even if there were, you cannot leave. You might as well try to walk away from your own arm.” This is Anne Enright, in typically brilliant form, on the invisible ties of motherhood, in her best-selling memoir Making Babies. It’s a quote that wouldn’t be out of place in Claire Kilroy’s new novel Soldier Sailor, a provocative and intriguing book that lays bare the delights and demands of new motherhood.

Kilroy’s nameless protagonist is an older first-time mother – some might say slave – to a cute, capricious toddler. From the prison/haven of their Howth home, the symbiotic relationship is powerfully depicted. He relies on her for everything; her equilibrium, meanwhile, is contingent on his moods, whims, appetite, sleep patterns, health. There is, towards the end of the novel, a virtuosic set-piece about a late-night fever that veers so far into nightmare territory, it feels as if we’re reading a thriller.

Such is the intensity of the world Kilroy creates, beginning with a frenetic prologue where the narrator is at the edge of some forest, at the edge of her own mind, really, close to abandoning her child. The chaotic action lands the reader in the middle of the madness, in media res, which is like opening a book at the worst point of a storm, without giving a context of where, when or who specifically is suffering. A story told by a woman who can’t get it together enough to say what is actually going on. This is a deliberate stylistic choice that may risk alienating readers initially but certainly works to reflect the trauma of new motherhood, the loneliness, guilt, the fog and incoherency.

The structure doesn’t follow a classical arc. Characterisation is deft but fleeting. Break-ups and reunions happen offstage

A shift in register to a clear-eyed, candid tone for the remainder of the narrative puts the chaos in perspective. What follows is a forensic study of motherhood by an author who has had time to seriously consider and give shape to the bedlam of the early months and years. Along with Enright, the work of writers such as Deborah Levy, Rachel Cusk, Lucy Caldwell come to mind. Kilroy is similarly astute, similarly relentless; she writes into the contradictions of motherhood, the dualities, the profound love and awe, the everyday drudgery, the exhaustion: “From the outside a woman cradling a newborn looks peaceful. A new mother is not peaceful but in a jittery state of high alert. We declare her serene so we can leave her to it.”

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Kilroy, the author of four previous novels, including Tenderwire and The Devil I Know, was awarded the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in 2004 and has been shortlisted for many prizes, including the Irish Novel of the Year award and the Kerry Group award for fiction. Although Soldier Sailor is billed as a novel, her first in 12 years, the structure doesn’t follow a classical arc. Characterisation is deft but fleeting. Break-ups and reunions happen offstage. The focus is on mother and son, soldier and sailor, a relationship that is strikingly rendered through the intimacy of the second-person voice: “Yes, yes, I know: we scream at each other from morning to night but my love for you swells its banks while you sleep.”

A soother in a mouth is “putting the pin back into a grenade”

Kilroy is superb on the burden placed on the primary caregiver, the desperate inequality in the division of labour. As the months trundle on, the narrator’s husband inches further and further away from taking care of his child, until he has the infuriating, almost plausible excuse of incompetence: “‘What? You’re better at this stuff.’” It isn’t always the mother who takes up the grunt work. One of the most enjoyable parts of the book is the friendship the narrator rekindles with an old college friend, a man who looks after his three small children while his wife, a doctor, goes to work. The pair have a killer dynamic, their dialogue full of mordant wit: “I’m so tired I’m almost stoned.” Kilroy makes you cheer for the narrator, who now has someone in the trenches with her, and crucially, a lifeline to her old identity, even if she can’t remember that person herself.

The prose throughout is admirable, images of the domestic made new and fresh, a reminder of the poetry of Eavan Boland. A soother in a mouth is “putting the pin back into a grenade”. Life before motherhood, “a different era, a dead civilisation. Deposed monarchs.” The daily toil, “shovelling coal in the bowels of the ship ... Until: a deck and an array of stars, the glittering ocean. My husband’s quarters.” Soldier Sailor is a resonant and important book, vital in all senses of the word, a flare sent up from the shores of early motherhood, a lesson in surviving the wilderness.