Ruth McKee’s debut novel is a haunting and evocative story of discovery and distress. Its central character, Eve, is the book’s core figure, and the arrangement of her thoughts and experiences shapes the novel’s style and locations, which range along Ireland’s eastern seaboard, from the excesses of university life to the early adult hangover of suburban isolation.
Often melancholy, and sometimes hallucinatory, Wild Iris explores the psychic dimensions of shame, inconfidence and a lack of self-affection that comes from characters cast as actors in dramas not of their choosing. McKee writes sensitively and well about experiences we more often hide in the seclusion of our very private selves. The novel visits the difficult terrain of motherhood, alienation and loss with a gift for language and observation that engages the reader in its sorrowful complexities. As it does so, it shares pen portraits of people and places that, while often unnamed, are so familiar as to be uncomfortably convincing.
The novel is set along the east coast of Ireland, from north to south. Its transport between is emotional and geographic. Readers who have taken the Belfast to Dublin train and back will recognise those journeys’ psychic eccentricities, and the various weights that attend departure, arrival and changed return. McKee creates a tight cast of characters around Eve, each of whom speaks to a fragment of Eve’s uncertain selfhood. Within this are concentrated studies of social situations that veer from the religious to the late night. The emotional power of the book proceeds from these intense vignettes, each of which is a little hinge around which the larger story turns. That story is shocking and surprising, and has, a little like Louise Kennedy’s Trespasses, the feeling of a short story extended into novel form.
The signature tone of all this is a self-awareness turned in towards loneliness and self-doubt, which echoes with the west coast fictions of Dermot Healy. The constriction of the social circumstances that shape this novel seem out of time with the rhythms of contemporary Ireland. But, as Wild Iris shows, the past lasts as long as the mind can remake it, the threads of association so thinly stretched that their breaking pulls the novel to its tragic, memorable end.
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Nicholas Allen is Baldwin Professor in Humanities, University of Georgia, and author of Late Heaney
