Reading Rites by Evelyn Conlon: Score-settling but no sackcloth in this series of reflections

It might seem strange for the author of an autobiographical work to condemn a “relentless breaking down of privacy” in today’s world. But Evelyn Conlon’s Reading Rites stays true to her distaste for the “sackcloth parade” of “telling the entire street” about past personal experiences. What we find in this series of reflections from her writing career is a refusal of the terms set by the very topics she addresses. For a country that considers itself to have entered a new era of social liberalism, Conlon’s testimony as a feminist activist serves as a reminder that the decades preceding this change contained more nuance than sometimes acknowledged. While a single mother and a student at the most Catholic of Irish universities, Maynooth – and later, following the birth of a second child and separation from her husband – Conlon encountered those efforts of solidarity that were a frequent reaction of citizens against the cruelly hypocritical norms upheld by church and State. “You’ll never get the Ireland you want,” sneered an opponent in 1979. Such progress as we have made is due to people such as Conlon.

Admirers of Conlon’s fiction will recognise a feature familiar since her debut short story collection, My Head Is Opening (1987): the full-tilt initiation into a definite point of view. Reading Rites also recalls the essayistic quality in Conlon’s novels. This tendency arises not only from their focus on social issues – such as the death penalty, in Skin of Dreams (2003) – or historical fact: the sending of female famine orphans to Australia, in Not the Same Sky (2013). Throughout her first novel, the Monaghan Bildungsroman Stars in the Daytime (1989), the narrator issues a running commentary on the constricted horizons of the heroine. In the short stories that continue to be an equally important part of Conlon’s oeuvre, protagonists resist being co-opted by a conformist collective consciousness. A central dynamic emerges: that of score-settling and one-upmanship. There is some of this in Reading Rites too, with targets generally anonymised. Whether or not Conlon’s fellow authors will enjoy the guessing game, an overriding theme remains that of creativity itself. There can be no doubt of Conlon’s dedication to her craft. Of the snare of a subject, she says “There comes a moment when a writer knows that they’re caught.”