Love Like Hate Adore, by Deirdre Purcell, Town House, 483pp, £15.99
Angela Devine, the narrator and protagonist of Deirdre Purcell's new novel, works in a delicatessen during the day, and at night she stretches the budget by delivering kissograms and singing in pubs. She's funny, courageous, and more than a mother to her little brother James, a motorcycle courier who is quiet and broody and wilder than she would like.
James's current girlfriend, Rosemary Madden, is a class apart from him and Angela - she is a printer's daughter, not too bright (she scraped enough points to be offered a course in Waterford RTC, but didn't want to take it up because she would have had to leave home), but clearly what the courts would call a girl from a very nice family.
When Rosemary accuses James of rape after a date, Angela goes down to the pawn shop and pledges everything, and sets out to fight to the death to defend her surrogate son.
Deirdre Purcell has approached the current theme of date-rape accusations with her keen fictional eye, but the focus is not on the accused rapist, but on the women around him. The reader seldom encounters James himself in any significant way, largely meeting him through Angela and her struggles on his behalf.
The narrator's mother had come from the rich Offaly midlands, a Protestant girl from a well-off family who came to Dublin pregnant and then sank rapidly through a life of increasing degradation, till she died, her skull split by junkies, when James was a new baby; Angela took him from the foster-home where he was placed and persuaded the authorities to give her custody.
Angela is that classic Irish figure, the good little girl always picking up after the incompetent parent and minding her younger siblings - though in this case the siblings are mostly fostered out, and her childhood is spent trekking across Dublin on buses in the care of a social worker as she makes access visits to her brothers and sisters.
She's a wonderful heroine, funny and loveable, with a sharp wit and a love of language that draw the reader through her stories of growing up, and her repeating of the stories she heard from her mother, before her mother was too stoned and too far-gone to speak to her.
Angela is courageous in the face of every challenge, yet this is a novel about weakness. All those around Angela are weak - her mother; the villagers who gossiped about her but failed to help her; the druggie crowd she fell into in Dublin; the boy who was the father of Angela, her first child; and Angela's brother, James, the rape accused.
The part of the media is a constant echo in this novel - Brid Og's summer discussion programme broadcasts a call from the anguished and angry mother of the girl whose accusation of rape begins the story, then it is taken up by Derek Davis and becomes the theme of choice in panel news programmes. As Angela settles back into real life after the case, all kinds of trouble starts: the newspapers and broadcasters portray her beloved James as a demon, and Rosemary, the girl who accused him of rape, as a martyr, while she sees it differently. There are threats, attacks, bricks through the window, the fear of being watched and followed. The novel is immense, often told in flashbacks which can become tedious as narrator Angela explores her own background in the sub-plot of her search for her mother's people, and for her father, and her first love, and the new man who helps her to look for her roots. While the central theme of Love Like Hate Adore is a gripping one, the flashbacks to which the narrative cuts away have little sense of risk or urgency to drive them, tempting the reader to skip pages to get back to the story of James and his accuser.
Love Like Hate Adore is reputedly already being courted by filmmakers, and the story of a boy accused of rape in circumstances where his family feel the accusation is questionable is certainly one that will find a ready audience.
Lucille Redmond is a journalist and critic