FICTION: The Cut of Love By Helena CloseHachette Books Ireland, 285pp, £12.99
THROUGHOUT THE 20th century, various Irish writers exploited the trope of childhood to explore and shape the construction of national identity. Before independence, Patrick Pearse's lyrical descriptions of Irish-speaking, Christ-like children in Íosagán agus Scéalta Eile(1907) and James Joyce's depictions of the dissatisfactions of urban childhood in Dubliners (1914) provided contrasting views of what it meant to be Irish.
During the 1960s, Edna O'Brien in The Country Girls(1960) and John McGahern in The Dark(1965) probed adolescence to expose the psychological and sexual frustrations of Catholic Ireland.
More recently, Patrick McCabe in The Butcher Boy(1992) and Roddy Doyle in Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha(1993) adopted the voice of a child to explore the disastrous effects of family breakdown combined with social inequity and indifference.
In her latest novel, The Cut of Love, Helena Close develops this established literary trend of perusing personal and public dysfunction through the prism of childhood.
Set in suburban Limerick in 2005, this extraordinary novel links the stories of Jane, a 12-year-old girl whose parents have recently and acrimoniously separated, and Alison, a middle-aged woman whose 15-year-old son has been killed in a car accident less than a year ago.
As these two characters narrate alternate chapters, they draw the reader into a disturbing world where the worst happens, but still more awful suffering lies ahead, and where it becomes impossible to separate innocence from guilt.
Neither narrator is totally reliable, but both are completely convincing in their attempts to cope with the grief that threatens to destroy them because they are incapable of either facing up to it or letting it go.
Jane loves her father but also fears his unpredictable mood swings, and resents having to spend time in his poky flat. Cutting herself with a razor blade somehow makes the pain more bearable, but does little to assuage her anxiety. Alison tries to hold herself together for the sake of her other children, but her relationship with her husband falls apart as her obsession with her dead son means that her heartache never heals. Their intertwining stories reinforce the ineluctability of loss and the precarious interdependence between children and adults. As the novel reaches its disturbing conclusion, the fragility of childhood is revealed, when Jane’s younger brother takes over the narration because the horror of unfolding events has resulted in his sister’s complete breakdown.
Between 2003 and 2006, Helena Close published four co-authored "chick lit" novels under the pseudonym Sarah O'Brien, and one novel, Pinhead Duffy, under her own name. Nothing she has written before equals or even suggests the disturbing, vivid authenticity of The Cut of Love, in which she explores the darker side of the search for love that characterised her earlier work.
Here, through the voice of Jane, she convincingly captures all the confusion and anxiety of Ireland in the 21st century as it teeters on the brink of implosion, economic and otherwise. This is a remarkable book that expands the frontiers of Irish popular fiction.
Anne Markey is a postdoctoral researcher on the IRCHSS- sponsored Early Irish Fiction project at TCD. Her edited volume, Short Stories: Patrick Pearse, was recently published by UCD Press