Angry comedy and empathy blend in life-and-death drama
“GROWING up on the farm I kept bad news to myself, for going public with fortune or misfortune brings drama.” So says Sinéad Hynes, explaining her reluctance to reveal her very recent diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
By page 12 she is being carted off to hospital in an ambulance, suffering respiratory failure, and still she refuses to tell her husband, assuring him she’s just got a serious chest infection.
Later, of course, husband Alex will (accidentally) find out, but is forbidden to reveal anything to their three young sons. For now, Sinéad has herself convinced that “Alex liked to believe what I told him, it was an efficient way to coexist and not go mad”.
She has underestimated her husband; she has underestimated herself. The action takes place in a six-bed ward, underloved and crumbling, in a Galway hospital. Manned by an Australian nurse and a Polish orderly, these side-players on the ward provide much of the comedy (there is a lot of comedy) and some of the comfort, too. But comfort, such as it is, comes mostly from Sinéad’s fellow patients.
Jane, an ex-schoolteacher, is suffering from dementia and is in turn shockingly cruel and extraordinarily kind as she slips in and out of lucidity. Despite having mothered nine children, there’s nobody in her family to tend to her needs and her monster of a husband Tom is languishing somewhere else, with dementia of his own.
Margaret Rose Sherlock is the working class matriarch of a family full of trouble. Patrick Hegarty across the way is a local county councillor, self-righteously proud of his long career of non-achievements and currently dying of cancer, and wordless Shane is paralysed from a motorbike accident.
Sinéad distracts herself with Google and her fellow patients. The ward is a madhouse, with one incident after the other unfolding as the storyline moves backwards and forwards, through Sinéad’s life and the lives of her fellow patients, with magnificent fluency.
Sinéad’s childhood is darkened by the malignant presence of her father. An abusive, wife-beating, sloppy farmer who made his children do all the hard work, he never allowed Sinéad to be sick. “You’re not sick at all, you’re a f **king chancer, you really are… don’t be such a c**t, there’s too much work for doing and you acting like a c**t...”
Her fellow patient, Jane, in one of her lucid moments, tells the story of her love for another woman, Ann. In the 1950s, Ann left for America and returned to Galway the following year, pregnant and unmarried.
“The father was American. And for all intents and purposes the sex could have been decent. American sex, where you could f **k and come without a criminal investigation.” Ann was dispatched to Tuam. “It was dusk when Ann made her way to the Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home. Good Help. Good Help to Those in Need. Bon Secours.”
It’s obvious from several novels published very recently that Tuam and the Magdalene Laundries are not going anywhere. The horrors of both endure in our contemporary literature like a massive, dormant volcano, waiting to spew. And Feeney’s commentary on the subjugation of women by the Catholic church is absolutely scathing.
Back in the ward, Sinéad’s condition worsens, although her defiance and refusal to accept treatment begin to wobble. Observing Margaret Rose Sherlock’s micro-management of her wayward family from her hospital bed gives Sinéad some considerable food for thought. But anyone expecting a Hollywood-type epiphany needs to read a different book. This is Galway. This is Elaine Feeney.
Praise has been heaped upon this novel’s head from many big names in Irish literature including Mike McCormack, Nicole Flattery, Sinead Gleeson and others.
It’s a perfectly poised blend of angry comedy and profound empathy. And despite this reader’s reluctance to trot out the wearily over-used “tour-de-force” to describe any novel, that’s precisely what Lisa McInerney called it. And what’s good for Lisa McInerney…well…