LITERARY FICTION
BLUE TICKET by Sophie Mackintosh
(Hamish Hamilton €14.85) SOPHIE MACKINTOSH’S unsettling, hypnotically eerie Booker-longlisted debut, The Water Cure, earned comparisons to The Handmaid’s Tale, and the influence of Atwood’s classic is evident here, too. As before, Mackintosh leaves the date, location and details vague, the better to focus on her concerns.
The future for women is now determined by means of a lottery: those who draw white tickets are permitted to have babies, but those who draw blue tickets may not.
Chemist Calla falls into the latter camp, but risks everything to rebel against her fate; becoming pregnant illicitly, she has no choice but to go on the run. However, as her survival skills are tested, she finds that she is not alone in her plight.
Mackintosh has a particular gift for coolly articulating visceral primal instincts and shaping them into controlled, striking prose. This is a potent exploration of biology and agency, motherhood and childlessness, which confirms her as a writer of note.
STRANGE FLOWERS by Donal Ryan
(Doubleday €12.99) IT’S 1973 when shy Moll walks out of her County Tipperary home and disappears. Her devout parents are heartbroken but, five years later, she returns. She is not alone, however, bringing with her from England a baby and — the wonder of the village — a black husband, Alexander.
Ryan has twice been longlisted for the Booker Prize, and the lilt of his phrases is a melodious pleasure, but the initial sense here is that he’s coasting.
A more ambitious novel gradually emerges, though — one that moves between characters and generations while weaving together strands of faith, fate and love.
When Moll and Alexander’s son, a wouldbe writer, also walks out, history seems to be repeating itself — although the real meat of the story, dished up late in the day, lies elsewhere.
The result is a novel carried by deep feeling and great empathy, rather than by a less-than-convincing plot that reminds you too frequently of the author’s hand on the tiller.
DEATH IN HER HANDS by Ottessa Moshfegh
(Cape €17.99) ‘FIRST impressions are often misleading,’ notes Vesta, the widowed septuagenarian narrator of Moshfegh’s metafictional latest. Indeed.
Ostensibly, this is a murder mystery spoofing murder mysteries, beginning when Vesta stumbles upon a suspicious note. Convinced that there has been a heinous crime, even with no sign of a body, she turns to Ask Jeeves for help, and is soon penning a Baroque backstory for the absent ‘victim’.
But gradually it’s Vesta herself who becomes the focus, as she recalls the cheating husband who belittled and controlled her. Escaping into the refuge of her ‘mindspace’ — Vesta’s word for her imagination — is, we realise, one of few consolations for a woman whose passion and potential has been cruelly curtailed and denied.
Spanning just 48 hours, and propelled by the insistency of lonely Vesta’s voice, this is an almost at-a-sitting read that, although muted in comparison to the rest of Moshfegh’s brilliantly macabre and outré oeuvre, nonetheless gets under your skin.