Here’s my review of Belinda McKeon’s debut novel from today’ Indy. It’s been cut, so I’ll post original verion of review below the link:
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/solace-by-belinda-mckeon-2350174.html
Here’s a longer version of the review:
Solace by Belinda McKeon
Picador £12.99
Reviewed by Leyla Sanai
On the surface, Solace is a thoroughly modern love story beset by tragedy, but at its core, this debut explores the ties and tensions between parents and offspring – the mixture of love and duty that grown-up children feel towards their ageing parents, and the wishes of the latter to mould the former into shapes they obstinately resist.
The prologue sets the scene. Tom is a farmer in Longford, southern Ireland. His adult son Mark is staying with his toddler to help with the baling of hay before returning to his home in Dublin. The father-son relationship is baked dry as drought-ridden land and the slightest disagreement sends ugly cracks flurrying across the surface. Tom sees Mark as alternating from sullen through taciturn to pugnacious. Mark ostensibly resents his father’s interference with the child’s routines, but his suppressed rage has a deeper cause.
McKeon then moves us back in time to the beginning of the story. Mark is a PhD student with writer’s block in Dublin. His thesis is on Maria Edgeworth, a writer who hailed from near his childhood home, but Mark is discovering that this was a bad reason to choose her as a subject. And then Mark meets a trainee solicitor called Joanne who grew up near him, a woman whose father Tom loathed.
The potent theme here is fraught parent-child relationships, a refrain that echoes throughout the book between not only Mark and Joanne and their parents but also a client of Joanne’s. The fallibility of both sides is clear in each case, some more than others. The third person narrator flits from one character’s POV to another’s. McKeon has a sharp ear for casual banter, social foibles and embarrassments, and her dialogue is convincing, made up of the trivialities/puns/awkward interludes in social interaction. She is also as astute on the gossip and parochialism of small communities as her fellow Irish writers Toibin and Trevor. More impressively, she captures the soul of Tom, an old-fashioned working man of gravitas and honour who, deep down, loves his family fiercely, but expects them to do his bidding. The irritation Mark feels towards his demanding father is clearly portrayed, as well as his own selfishness/indolence/intolerance: he spends little time working and can be supercilious towards rural folk, sneeringly observing that his father doesn’t understand the meaning of ‘ignorant’ and noticing another farmer talking about ‘global warning’. The balance is more skewed in Joanne’s case, her father being blatantly corrupt, but as regards her mother, again the reader is aware that neither is saint nor ogre. It is this depiction of the fallibility of all the major characters that is this novel’s main strength – humans are flawed, people are rarely ‘right’ or ‘wrong.’
McKeon is convincing on the trials of young parenthood and the charm of babies: although the exhaustion of young parenthood has been covered before (Rachel Cusk, Helen Walsh)and thus isn’t groundbreaking, it adds to the authenticity.
The prologue is arresting for its terse precision and stark tension but Mckeon’s prose elsewhere is more journalist reportage than atmosphere-setting creative writer. Perhaps there is that temptation when first writing a book to include everything, but she would do well to take a lesson from Trevor/ Toibin that less may be more – scene setting is essential but trivial details (such as the plastic chairs, tables, glasses, beer and food in a pub) dilute power rather than adding to it. Mark makes a similar weak joke about masturbation causing blindness twice, and Mark and Joanne wring two jokes from a throwaway comment about sushi – again, although realistic dialogue is vital, reporting minutiae isn’t: with many things that seem funny at the time the humour is in the spontaneity, so reporting them in writing isn’t wise. Similarly, Mark’s thoughts about parties being the best places to meet people are not insightful or original enough to add to the tale unless we’re meant to think he’s leaden and slow, in which case there would be entertaining ways of conveying the fact. And sometimes the language just feels wrong – at the party McKeon tells us ‘the mood was positively phosphorescent… delighted in the extreme’, a phrase which is enthusiastic but would work better in speech than in writing. Sometimes it feels as if there are two books bursting from the same cover – a quiet, deeply reflective and perspicacious one about the mutual pain and duty between parents and offspring, and a lesser, lightly humorous romance.
Mary Lawson and Patrick Lane conveyed dysfunctional family relations on a farm setting with more poetry and brutal, shattering power, but McKeon’s talent is for juxtaposing modern city life with rural traditions. Her debut is by no means perfect, but her evocation of the invisible umbilical cord of love and duty that still binds parent and child is thoughtful and a promising glimpse of more to come.
