It is 1986. Twenty-nine-year-old Marlo, English-born but Irish by blood, inherits a cottage on the remote Beara Peninsula. When he discovers his sister is actually his mother, and she refuses to name his father, he impulsively decides to move to Ireland.
Marlo arrives in Glengarriff to find a community that is excessively religious, yet also irreverent, feisty and generous, tolerant of “blow-ins” such as the Dutch neighbours, and the retired English couple who own the estate. At the same time, racism lurks behind occasional comments. Memories are long, “and tongues longer still”.
A freelance journalist, Marlo gets work as a gardener on the estate. He meets Kitty, a single mum who has struggled against long-standing prejudice. When Mossie, a bus driver, dies of a heart attack, Marlo steps in to take Mossie’s place. Marlo’s kind nature is further revealed through his relationship with animals, and with Sully, Kitty’s mute six-year-old son.
The narrative gains heft when another mute from the early 1600s, also called Sully, appears. Having escaped a massacre by the Crown forces on his home island of Dursey, he flees with his father, who has been entrusted to protect his overlord O’Sullivan’s wife and infant. As the complex historical layers become enmeshed with the present, they add symbolic weight to the idea of inheritance and what we carry with us.
Cauvery Madhavan, the daughter of a military man, is familiar with migration and, as with earlier novels, she focuses on themes of conflict and identity. Lightly touched on too are the generational hurts caused by religious hypocrisy, guilt and shame. Though Indian-born, Madhavan has lived in Ireland for decades and has developed a keen ear for Irish expression: “Nothing like an old wound that’s kept well-salted.”
While there is no sense of Marlo’s physical appearance, and his evolving relationship with Kitty seems unrealistically coy, I was captivated by Madhavan’s evocation of place: “ ... hazel and willow walking straight towards the cliffs.” For anyone interested in history, this is a compelling narrative about the tumultuous events of the early 1600s and the state of terror that existed in the region. The Inheritance is also, more than anything, a love letter to west Cork.
Afric McGlinchey’s latest book is Tied to the Wind (Broken Sleep Books)
