Four sisters: lives grown apart and entwined again
Caoilinn Hughes’s third novel is bold, witty and intellectual. The Flattery sisters, orphaned in tragic circumstances as teenagers, are now in their 30s and living largely separate lives.
Olwen, the eldest, a professor of geology in Galway, lives with her widower partner and his two young sons. We meet her in the thick of it at work, where she’s an enthusiastic teacher, frustrated by the lack of understanding of the enormity of the climate crisis.
A key piece of her research has been turned down for publication. By the end of chapter one, we know that Olwen, like the earth, is on a precipice.
Chapter by chapter, we visit the three other sisters. Rhona is a well-known, well-off professor of political science in Trinity College. Living in Sutton with her baby son Leo and a Peruvian postdoc student as a part-time nanny, she’s determined to find a way towards a more participative democracy.
Maeve is a celebrity chef and cookbook author who produces bespoke dining experiences for London high society. She lives on a houseboat with an almost silent undocumented Bosnian mime artist, whom she rescued from his tent home by the canal. She ponders his usefulness as a sperm donor.
Maeve is under pressure from her publisher and her wealthy clients. She also misses her sister Nell, but treasures their online transatlantic work together – their much-watched Insta videos, Meals and Meditations.
Nell is the youngest and struggling financially as an untenured professor, travelling between three colleges in Connecticut.
She has no medical insurance and cannot afford to have the increasingly distressing issue of the numbness in her lower limbs investigated. She feels sure that there must be more to life than constant acquisition and consumption.
It’s refreshing to read female characters who are so absorbed in their work and so exercised by the bigger picture – climate, homelessness, food provision, participation in political life.
And in terms of structure, Hughes has set herself free. When Olwen disappears, leaving her entire life behind, the three other sisters set about finding her. Then, after the family reunites, the book switches from prose to witty, banter-laden stage play, complete with stage direction. And it works.
The conversations between the sisters, in the house and the pub, are both quickfire and expansive.
Where previously we were relying on the sisters’ views of each other to glean details of their respective personalities, they now speak for themselves. It’s energising stuff.
Hughes is a stylish writer. She produces beautiful, intricate sentences, but they’re occasionally overly laden with metaphor or verbosity.
Quibbles aside, this is an exciting book, a book of intelligent women that very successfully plays with form and intertwined big ideas. A book that is, like its author and its characters, very clever.