Josephine Strane is a child minder. She is, though, herself only a child, labelled "simple" early on in her life and as a result thrust into an adult world she is unable to fully comprehend. And yet, she is quite capable of living in that adult world, successfully hiding her skewed and unsettled outlook beneath a plausible exterior. This is a story that exploits the gap between exterior and interior realities, between the calm of supposed everyday normality and the deadly imaginings within the mind of a disturbed young woman. Outwardly competent and willing in her role as a child minder and housekeeper to first the Caseys and then the Frasers, the dark reality behind this mask becomes frighteningly apparent as the novel unfolds. As was the case with his first novel, Alice Falling, William Wall is here again drawn to dealing with the often violent undercurrents bubbling away below society's surface order. Josephine's life has been one of almost casual neglect, violence and abuse at the hands of her alcoholic mother. With no reliable reference to what is right and wrong, her moral sensibility is a patchwork of her dead Auntie Mary's various throwaway maxims - "Tell the truth and shame the devil", "Cleanliness is next to Godliness " - and advice gleaned from the letters pages of women's magazines. Armed with this knowledge, Josephine imposes an order on her life that precariously attempts to balance her desire for love and acceptance with her obsessive need to control, which ultimately leads to destruction. Wall plays on the nightmarish fears of all parents, of letting the wrong person be in charge of one's child and paying dearly for that mistake. Subtly, he teases out the consequences of misplaced trust in what amounts to a morality tale for contemporary Celtic Tiger Ireland, where traditional values are rapidly being eroded. Ireland can no longer be thought of as "safe" in comparison to the wider world. Minding Children would appear to prove the old maxim that it does not matter what a story is about, what is really important is how that story is told. In truth, it could be said that the plot here is somewhat similar to a trashy, true-life, made-for-TV movie. However, it is William Wall's brilliance as a stylist that keeps the reader's attention and lifts the novel onto a much more serious plane. It is not surprising that William Wall is also a poet: his attention to language and its possibilities comes through in every paragraph. He perfectly matches form to content: his measured prose, calm and deliberate, like his main character Josephine, contains within it a quiet, brooding, menace. Josephine's past life is interwoven within the main narrative of her time with the Caseys and the Frasers. As the story of her own violent and abused upbringing is told, the sense of her as a victim and a product of her internalised pain and hurt becomes clearer and clearer. Crucial, formative moments are revisited again and again, gaining significance with this layering effect, and allowing the novel to build toward a horribly inevitable climax. Wall's portrait of Josephine is utterly convincing, as are the other characters in the novel. In the end, this is an intimate tale, well told, that draws the reader into a world both familiar and frightening.
Derek Hand is Faculty of Arts Fellow in the Department of Anglo-Irish Literature and Drama, UCD