Alice Taylor's readers may not look for guidance on the literary pages of major newspapers. Her work has no need of such exposure or criticism. Yet Taylor is an interesting phenomenon. Selling everywhere, from major bookstores to humble huckster shops, she lines up beside the kind of steamy blockbusters which celebrate human excess. Contrarily, her works describe small, not very sexy, Irish lives. And her sales around the world indicate a readership hungry for less.
That restraint, both in style and content, is noticable in Taylor's many volumes of memoir and two of fiction. Her favourite word is "simple", an adjective once favoured by Irish nuns and used approvingly in matters of dress and decor. The writing style is pretty unadorned, too. As for the kind of hard facts which might root experience into landscape, these are kept rare and vague. There is little sense of place or of the business of country life. Despite changing fashions in farming, cows are always "cows", whatever the decade, trees are noted for their size and fields are simply patches of good or bad land. Thus rural Ireland is made blandly universal, a place where innocence is bliss. "Simple", after all, has another meaning in Ireland: mildly retarded.
Despite such gaps, Alice Taylor is an outstanding storyteller. Like a true seanchai, she uses detail to signal twists in the plot or trouble ahead. Across the River is the second volume in the saga of the farming Phelans and their neighbours. The blurb describes the book as a "novel" (a term now used promiscuously by publishers to describe any work of the imagination) but it is never that. It is tightly plotted fiction, an old-fashioned page-turner with all the moral certainties of a fairy tale.
The eternal quality makes time unreliable, though the date is 1960. The beautiful widow, Martha Phelan, is in conflict with her son, Peter. He wants a milking machine and a tractor (neither of them drives a car): she dreams of a new house. Across the river, Matt Conway glowers jealously from the fence which will eventually kill him. He is the villain of the piece, wife beater and child abuser. In the past, he has snatched contraceptives from his poor spouse without pausing to wonder how his little neighbourhood is so ahead of its time: it boasts an enlightened doctor (whom we never meet) and a priest who sanctions the Pill. Instead, Conway tries to rape young Nora Phelan, whose therapy consists of embarrassed sympathy and a promised trip to New York. And so we have the markers for the next volume, including Martha's new love interest, a close friend of her artistic, confirmed bachelor brother.
Who knows what this rural community, avant-garde only in matters to do with sexual medicine, may be about to discover in its midst next - sex change? Aids? In vitro fertilisation? How long can things be kept (in every sense) as simple as they've been so far in Alice Taylor's world?
Aisling Foster is a novelist and critic