The past casts a long shadow

Patching Time takes us into the heart of 21st-century rural Ireland where money lending, drugs, blackmail and murder are the backdrop to a story about retribution, love and forgiveness.

Modern Ireland is a country with modern crimes, although many crimes are as ancient as the lore, myths and traditions of the island itself and driven by those universal human failings: greed, corruption and revenge. It is also a country built on centuries of wars and struggles for freedom and independence. Accounts of long ago have been passed on through historical document, oral tradition, music, dance and literature, as well as being carved out on the landscape. Nobody knows better than the Irish how to make heroes and decry villains, how to glorify days of old and mourn them, and how to invent and reinvent times of yore. We have spent lifetimes making up and making up for the past.

When we try to reconstruct what has gone before, not surprisingly fact and fiction compete and merge. This novel is, in part, inspired by these differing interpretations and reinventions of the past and how they weigh on our actions. What is passed on and believed to be true, rightly or wrongly, is as important in patterning everyday behaviour as is an understanding based on facts, wherever we focus our lens: individually, family, community, country...

Personally, I have never been the best at trawling through historical detail; I take what interests me, collage my own version of events and leave the rest. We all do, inevitably settling for something that we are comfortable with.

But of course there is the darker side, resulting from manipulation of the past for wrong ends. While tradition is in essence healthy, giving us a sense of place and of who we are, the world of extremists and traditionalists is not. Romanticising the past is one thing, but adhering to tradition as authority in matters of religion and norms of life is dangerous. We need to be wary of the truth bearers in any domain and never underestimate what can seep through the filters of our mind.

Likewise, the shadow of the past hangs over the main characters of this novel. Whether on the brink of adolescence, Genie and Branly, middle-aged like Lily, the elderly Sheila, or the 80-year-old Frenchwoman Henrietta – grappling with the truth is never easy.

Lily Casey’s immediate concern is the threat to her 12-year-old daughter’s life made by a blackmailer, forcing Lily to remain quiet about a racket of moneylending and drugs in the factory where she works. She seeks refuge in Killdoe, north Kerry, near her ancestral farm, believing that home is a safer option. Lily left Killdoe many years earlier nursing wounds and disappointments. Although her parents and grandparents have passed away, she has put together her own picture of her family history and is especially proud of her grandparents and the heroic role they played in former Irish wars. Honour is important to Lily, a value she has tried to instil in her daughter, Genie.

While Lily’s understanding of the historic past lived by her grandparents is something that has been passed down, for her new friend, Henrietta Bontemps, it is different. Henrietta was a child during the second World War and lived though the horrors of war in her native Normandy. At one moment in the story, she takes a history book about the occupation of France from the shelves of Killdoe library and observes that the so-called evidence is arranged chronologically and laid out neatly in words, lines and chapters, with footnotes and references to prove everything – but nothing captures what it was really like in her little village when friends and foes came in many guises.

During the second World War and its aftermath, Henrietta saw how the abnormal and slightly mad could attract and how that pull succeeded better than the “normal” in impacting others. Henrietta knows how lives were destroyed as families and communities were split in search of their own brand of justice. Henrietta sees some of that hatred in Sheila O’Connell, shopkeeper in Killdoe, and believes her to be venomous and vindictive.

Sheila O’Connell has a distorted view of the past and is obsessed with preserving the town’s heritage. She is puritanical to the extreme; for Sheila, all things Irish are good and everything else bad. Furthermore, she seems bent on vengeance against Lily Casey and her daughter. Sheila too has been harbouring stories passed on by her own grandparents, telling of betrayal and wrongs to her family involving the Caseys.

Some of the answers to questions about those bygone days may lie in The Old Forge, a cottage Henrietta is renovating and whose ghosts stir up memories of Lily’s ancestors. However, it is the children, Genie and her friend, Branly, from a rough housing estate, who inadvertently uncover many secrets about the past. Unfortunately, they are also particularly vulnerable to the mind games of Sheila. Although Henrietta and Lily try to protect the children from Sheila’s twisted control, they risk ending up being pawns in a story where the blackmailer’s threats are more intertwined with the past than might at first seem obvious.

In conclusion, it is fair to say that history is personal to each and every one of us, lending many colours to the truth. Thus, while the past echoes all around casting light and shadow, we are imperfect conductors of its music. What counts is true love, boundless and ageless, helping us stitch it all together to make up happier sounds – patching time and making it rhyme.

[ Patching Time by Kathleen Curtin is out now ]