Donal Ryan made a stir straight out of the gate. His first novel, The Spinning Heart, published a dozen years ago, won the Guardian first book award and was longlisted for the Booker prize. A work of choral elegance, it is told in a sequence of 21 voices, inhabitants of a community in County Tipperary, Ireland – where Ryan himself is from – and unspooled the long and bitter wake of the 2008 financial crash in Ireland. Some compared the book to Edgar Lee Masters’ lyrical Spoon River Anthology; William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying also comes to mind.
Since then, Ryan has published five more novels and a book of short stories, firmly establishing himself in a generation of remarkable Irish writers – Claire Kilroy, Claire-Louise Bennett, Kevin Barry, Eimear McBride, the list could go on and on. He is a writer who likes a conceit: a chronological structure to contain the narrative; multiple voices. It is a measure of his skill, and gift for both language and character, that these techniques don’t seem like contrivances, but rather widen the reader’s sense of what a story can be.
And so it is with this sequel to his debut, Heart, Be at Peace. Once again, he gives us a sequence of 21 voices; readers of the first book will be reunited with many of the folk they came to know – but never fear, this works just as well as a standalone. Ryan is always deeply engaged by the way the fortunes of 21st-century Ireland impact directly on his characters: the financial emergency that afflicted this small town may have faded, but new troubles – opportunities, to some – have arisen to take their place. Ryan deftly interweaves a larger sense of danger, and an understanding of Ireland’s history, with domestic concerns.
We start with Bobby, who’s gone on a stag do to Amsterdam against his better judgment; to his horror, a compromising photograph is now doing the WhatsApp rounds among his pals. He berates himself for acting like a foolish young man; he’s now middle-aged, with a wife, Triona, whom he loves, and two grown kids. But he’s worried about his kids – or rather, he tells us that Triona is, a man’s way of admitting to feeling. “She frets and holds her phone in her hand, looking down at it every second they’re out of the house. They’re dealing right there on the street inside in Nenagh, she says. They’re out here in the village, too.”
This is Ryan setting up the mechanism of his plot, although it never moves in a linear fashion. We have some work to do, as readers, in mapping the connections between one voice after another – but this is not by any means a failing. It’s a kind of simulacrum of life, as if we have been landed in this village, have a chance to overhear its inhabitants’ most private thoughts, move from one house to another, sit in the pub, discover who believes who is to blame for what, and what can be excused or forgiven. It would be wrong to give too much away, but those drugs that Triona fears are overtaking the town are at the heart of the matter. The village, the nearby city, the whole island of Ireland – and by extension, all of us – have had to find new ways of surviving since the crash of 2008.
Once Vasya worked as a builder, a Russian immigrant with a trade; but now that work has long gone and he lives rough. “I have no country except the country that stretches itself from river mouth to river mouth and from the water’s edge to the fenced-off land where cattle graze in squares of green grass, the greenest grass in the world it seems, grass that would make my father whistle through his teeth in wonder and joyful expectation of bounty.” His former employer, who once betrayed and abandoned him, asks him to ferry packages across the lake. “He says I’m the only man he can really trust” – and who doesn’t want to be trusted, needed?
Réaltín’s little boy, Dylan, was kidnapped, held for two nights in a house but then returned safe and sound – or so it seems, for her tone veers between the contentment of one who’s choosing not to see what is before her eyes, and the rage of one who knows, as she must, what’s really going on. Gradually the pieces fit together, a ragged, unhappy jigsaw, until the hidden legacy of Ireland’s fight for independence provides an explosive denouement.
This resolution, if examined closely, is perhaps a little too neat. Overall that doesn’t detract from the rich pleasures of this novel, in which Ryan captures the varieties of Irish English (there are “dotes” and “yokes” aplenty, though nothing ever feels like caricature). There is a sense too, sometimes, of eloquence a little divorced from who these people might actually be. “Everything falls apart,” thinks Rory, a young man with a baby on the way. “All things tend toward chaos. I close my eyes against the mad torrent of panic. This is okay, I think. This is life, this is life, this is how it’s meant to be.” It’s not quite of a piece with what has come from Rory before: and yet Ryan reminds us that everyone we meet might be more than our easy assumptions, if we could only know their hearts.
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