Superb debut novel that’s a study in defiance

Yes, it’s another story about another miserable childhood in 20th century Ireland. But don’t add this novel to that particular pile of woes.

Or if you do, make sure it sits near the very top, nestling with Edna O’Brien and John McGahern or, more latterly, Donal Ryan and Louise Nealon.

One of the blurbs on the cover describes it as ‘devastating’ and it’s a word that this reader has seen far too many times, describing far too many novels that turned out to be decidedly non-devastating. But this is one of the saddest novels I’ve read in recent years, without a single hint of self-pity. Another blurb describes debut novelist Fitzgerald as “arriving fully formed”. And that’s pinpoint accurate.

When we first meet Jean Kennedy, she’s hiding in the branches of the laburnum tree at the bottom of the garden that backs on to her middle-class south Dublin family home. She is three years of age and wishing for Winnie the Pooh to come and play with her.

She is sheltering from the verbal violence of HIM (always in capital letters), her bully of a father whose anger, and utter disqualification for decent human being status, poisons this rapidly expanding family from the get-go.

Toxic masculinity has become such a catch-all cliché, but never has the phrase described so perfectly this father of the Kennedy brood. HE is rarely violent, but nonetheless a dark and seething force of nature, a menacing shadow under which all of his children and his wife must be pliant, compliant, sycophantic, silent.

A holiday in Butlins is ruined. A day out at the zoo is ruined. A home-help embarks on sexual relations with HIM, leading Jean’s beloved mother to a nervous breakdown and spell in the asylum. She returns months later, a bloated whale of a woman, puffed out by her medications, drowsy and defeated. An aunt on her mother’s side is rendered helpless and an uncle on her father’s side will sexually abuse Jean and try it on with her younger sister.

And the genius here is that every word is Jean’s own, from the ages of eight to eighteen. Her language and emotional understanding changes significantly in these crucial years, helped by the books she devours. Jean is a loner, a position she has not chosen but rather has been chosen for her, growing up in the days of ‘what would the neighbours think’.

Her story is both a chronicle of shame and a study in sustained, quiet defiance. This novel is indeed devastating. And superb.