THESE two debut novels by Irish writers are both from Irish publishers and both are set in contemporary Ireland. There the comparison ends. Breaking Out is the novella sized Bildungsroman of orphaned Eleanor Leyden, whose solitary, difficult youth in Dublin is followed by a sojourn in France and Greece. The chapters are short and spare, written in a prose style that strives for a quirky yet literary effect.
Eleanor, stuck in a conformist milieu after the premature death of her communist parents, has a natural inclination to shock to live on the borders of respectability. Her defensive insecurity is exacerbated by the fact that her arm was incapacitated in the accident that killed her parents the numb limb is a potent, if rather overstated, symbol of the subsequent numbing of her trust in the world. Yet, in common with that earlier orphan, Jane Eyre, Eleanor has a "defiant flame" in her and is determined to find love and role models where she can, and plans for a better future when she comes into her inheritance.
Death and Plenty is set in Ennismuck, a down at heel village on the west coast of Ireland, a fictional territory which possesses elements of both Sligo and Mayo. This is a longer, more fully fleshed affair than the slim line Breaking Out. Leyden's novel is a self confessed yarn that encompasses a whole community, mixing topical issues and folklore with a light hearted inability to take itself too seriously.
The book centres on the efforts of Mulcahy, a local sculptor, designer of Macnas style parades and occasional salmon poacher, to create a controversial monument as a centrepiece for the village. In organising the festival which evolves around the monument he is superseded by Grace O'Connor (the love interest), an Irish American costume designer who has turned up to find her roots and does so in one melodramatic swoop Oliver, the alcoholic mechanic with a heart of gold Sam, the bowler hatted Beckett convert Tom Giblin, the socialist who is trying to thwart the activities of a gold mining company that is prospecting on the mountain, and more.
It would be simplistic to typecast these two very different novels as an intense psychological study versus a vaudevillian romp. Breaking Out, for all its "renditions of Eleanor's alienation, contains a share of jagged humour. Eleanor, the child of non-Catholic parents, is fascinated by the strange rituals and beliefs to which she is introduced when her foster parents send her to a convent school. Encountering a sympathetic nun, she realises that nuns have naked bodies too, tucked away beneath their habits. She asks "Do you have a hairy molly between your legs?" Eleanor's spirited, highly authentic dialogue with her friend Louise is also one of the strengths of the book.
Death and Plenty, for all its easy laughs and tears, contains a thoughtful sub text which weaves together strands of mythic symbolism the machinations of corrupt local politicians and dubious mining companies and the limited opportunities for life enhancement available to the denizens of small villages in contemporary rural Ireland.
Death and Plenty manages to flirt with stereo types without fully succumbing, and there are welcome stretches of surreal, madcap humour, especially when it comes to the double faceted Celtic symbol of the pig which gives the book its title. Tuttle, the nervy, pill popping publican in Ennismuck, is haunted by Hann O'Brienesque nightmares of the black pig coming after him and when Mulcahy's porcine monument proves heavier than expected, there are high jinks involving the tipsy Oliver and a stolen crane.
The humour can be tellingly pointed. A less digestible, sometimes forced aspect of the book is Mulcahy's tendency to lecture Grace on Irish history and society. His spiels risk saying too insistently what elements of the story itself illustrate more effectively. There is an hilarious conversation on what it means to be Irish among the German cheese makers, yoga teachers, aroma therapists and others who have settled in Ennismuck which says more about recent changes in rural Irish society than any long winded monologue ever could.
Breaking Out contains echoes of Deirdre Madden's The Birds of the Innocent Wood, both in its rendition of how the violent death of parents affects the orphaned offspring and in its examination of the intertwined intimacy and hostility in close bonds between young women. In spite of certain draw backs, such as the sometimes jarringly short chapters, the abrupt ending, and the occasional mannered descriptions, the novel contains some fine, original writing. "Doubt lurked in her like a bruise, ignored until something brushed against it."
While Death and Plenty could have been a shade slimmer and Breaking Out could have benefited from substantial fattening up, these two novels in their contrasting fashions are highly readable and bode well for the health of new Irish fiction.