In Donal Ryan’s 2012 debut, The Spinning Heart, set in the aftermath of the financial crash, 21 characters living in and around a village in County Tipperary open up about their private lives as the Celtic tiger era turns to dust around them.
The first voice we hear belongs to Bobby Mahon, a well-liked builder whose team has been shafted by a local property developer. He fantasises about killing his father. Subsequent characters confess infidelities, plot kidnappings and rake over decades-old grievances that are as fresh as the day they were hatched. Together, the overlapping stories yield a sharp-eyed portrait of rural Ireland in a time of upheaval that’s been widely praised – The Spinning Heart won several prizes, including the Guardian first book award.
Since then, Ryan has stuck close to his native Tipperary, with some of the characters from his debut cropping up in later novels,among them The Thing About December, set in the same community 10 years earlier. Now he’s reviving all 21 narrators of The Spinning Heart a decade on, despite the fact that one is dead and others will have met their ends before the story is done. If violence was simmering gently in the earlier novel, now it’s frothing over the sides.
We begin again with Bobby, whose business is back on its feet – he’s building extensions instead of ghost estates – but whose marriage is threatened by an incriminating photo circulating on WhatsApp. He’s also nursing murderous feelings towards a local drug gang, whose malign influence affects nearly every character in the book. Ireland’s financial woes might have eased but there’s no shortage of other crises to fill the gap.
The structure that worked so well for Ryan in The Spinning Heart is reprised here. Each successive narrator moves us forward in time and the main plotlines are often glimpsed from the side rather than experienced head-on. The recapping required to bring us up to speed can feel laboured at times but is more than compensated for by the rough-edged poetry that Ryan spins from his environment.
One character describes a romantic rival as having “a face like a bulldog chewing a scorpion”. More lyrically, a daughter recalls how her late father’s eyebrows “bushed like wild hedgerows”. Occasionally, wordiness gets the better of Ryan, as in the case of Trevor, the child-snatcher from the earlier novel, whose madness has taken on an oddly antique style. And when one narrator, who is writing a series of monologues very like the ones we’re reading here, refers to the “hack” author of The Thing About December, the tricksiness is at odds with the book’s heartfelt tone.
It’s not all indignation and despair, though when characters experience joy they think twice about making a show of it. “You can’t be going around acting too happy,” says one narrator. “When lads start moaning about shite, giving out about wives and children and wages and tax and cars breaking down and horses not coming in and the weather and the price of everything I nod and agree away” – but really he feels like telling them to “just take life easy, enjoy it while you have it”. In Ryan’s world of trauma and bone-deep resentments, that’s easier said than done.
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