With his first two novels, Home from England and Dismantling Mr Doyle, James Ryan established himself as a skilled anatomist of human vulnerability in the face of ineluctable change. Both works explore how individuals respond when their carefully contrived identities begin to unravel under the pressure of dislocatory forces.
In each novel the exposure of the faultlines between the present and the past, between public and private histories, precipitates varying degrees of anger, anxiety and disillusionment.
In Seeds of Doubt, his third novel, Ryan broadens his fictional canvas while probing deeper into themes which structured his first two books. The story centres on the Mackens of Templeard, a proud Tipperary family of five sisters who grew up in the 1930s and 1940s. The opening section is narrated by Nora Macken who looks back over her life from the perspective of the late 1970s. She is a woman seeking to escape from the prison of memory by confronting the traumatic event which has blighted her past and threatens her future: her rape by a priest in her mid-teens.
This gross violation was compounded by the fact that it could never be acknowledged publicly or privately, not even by Nora herself. Like a malignant tumour, her secret festered at the core of her being, invisibly infecting the whole family.
In addition to eroding her self-belief, it spawned a corrosive guilt and an unrequited craving for forgiveness, not only from her sisters but from Templeard itself, for having violated its "cloistered security".
Templeard is the most powerful presence in the novel, a superbly realised physical and figurative entity. As a house with "its own language, a language woven for a group, one that is ill-suited to charting individual journeys," it acts as a vivid metaphor for the hardening of egalitarian ideals into exclusivist dogmas in post-independence Ireland.
Like `Great Meadow' in McGahern's Amongst Women, a house it rivals in power and stature, Templeard is a place which lays claim to its own with an almost tyrannical constancy. But, as Nora belatedly recognises, "there was an outrageous cost to the life it fostered, one that was borne largely by those it considered it was protecting." In her case, the price of fealty was silence. For 40 years she has been unable to take possession of her story because of the "corrosive bargain to leave so much unsaid". Now in her mid-50s, she has finally resolved to break this destructive bargain and negotiate a new deal with the future.
The catalyst for her act of repossession is the decision of her sister, Flossie, to sell the house. But as Nora's narrative coalesces, Flossie's narrative fragments, her whole life having "taken shape in and around a conspiracy to deny the existence of Nora's child." Meanwhile, far away in Italy, that child lives out a pitiable, tragic existence, desperately seeking refuge in other people's stories because he has no story of his own.
Nora Macken's is one of the silenced voices of post-revolutionary Ireland. It is left to her nephew, Patrick, to trace the origins of her cultural elision to a once noble righteousness that fuelled the struggle for independence but subsequently turned inwards, "spawning a tightlipped, mutant piety". Nora's triumph lies in her act of narration, the ultimate expression of her refusal to succumb to the deterministic imperatives of family, religion and state. By breaking the silence she has come into possession of her story, her voice, her self.
Seeds Of Doubt is a novel which deftly illuminates the devastating human consequences of denial and deception in a society which forces its citizens to live up to a false, idealised image of itself. As such, it deserves to takes its place alongside The Heather Blazing and Reading in the Dark as a text which indicts the oppressive power of the national meta-narrative to suppress realities which cannot be accommodated within the officially authorised version of Irishness. Meticulously patterned and psychologically concentrated, it confirms Ryan's mastery of fictional structures and retrospective first-person narration, while also signifying his deepening desire to articulate the voices and histories of those who have been deprived of the consciousness of both.
Liam Harte lectures in Irish Studies at St Mary's College in London. He is the co-editor of Contemporary Irish Fiction: Themes, Tropes, Theories, published last year by Macmillan