Two novels about rural Ireland in the wake of the economic crash, published in 2011 and 2012 respectively, make for an interesting comparison both with each other and with Caoilinn Hughes second novel about which I’ve written before.

About a week ago, I posted on my personal site my second look at Caoilinn Hughes’s second novel, The Wild Laughter (2020). It’s a novel that I’ve found myself coming back to, though not because I particularly like it. At first it came as a shock: not at all what I had been expecting after her first novel and the short stories. My impulse was to dismiss it, but how could I then account for its enthusiastic critical reception? A blurb on the front cover of the paperback proclaims that Roddy Doyle “loved this book”; he’s joined in his praise by David Nicholls, Sarah Perry and the Financial Times. Kevin Barry is obviously a fan: see the video interview I refer to in that previous post). I must be missing something.

One comment by Hughes herself in that video interview caught my attention: speaking about the publication of her first novel, Orchid and the Wasp (2018), she said “I don’t really like to lose people money.” Was it possible that she had made a conscious change of direction with the second novel, to try to avoid losing her publisher any more money?

When I first read The Wild Laughter, I hadn’t yet read Donal Ryan’s first novel, The Spinning Heart (2012). When I eventually did get around to that, I found myself wondering if this was the model that Hughes had been copying. Having thought about it, I’ve concluded that it’s unlikely that Hughes was imitating Ryan. The similarities between these novels probably comes from their setting in the aftermath of the 2008 crash, a time when Ireland was taking economic dictation from the European Central Bank, the EU Commission and the International Monetary Fund. While The Spinning Heart came out at a time when “austerity” was in full force, Hughes’s novel (which she says she had been working on for several years) appeared some time later. No doubt part of my reaction against The Wild Laughter arises from an unwillingness to be reminded how bad things were in those days.

One significant difference between Hughes’s novel and Ryan’s is that while the former consists entirely of the first-person narrative of a character whose understanding of his own situation is sadly limited, the latter is narrated by twenty-one different characters, none of whom sees the whole picture but who together are able to give the reader a fairly accurate and complete sense of the story. Each of these individual narratives is short — the entire book runs to only 156 pages.

Each narrator gets only one shot at saying what they have to say: the novel never doubles back to hear from a character twice. At first, I found this disorienting. The first chapter is in the voice of Bobby, clearly an important character and a well regarded person in the locality where he lives, near Nenagh (a fairly large town in County Tipperary). He’s the foreman of a crew of builders (whose boss has just absconded without having paid their tax or social insurance). He’s also a sporting hero.

For the first few chapters, I kept expecting to get back to Bobby, to hear the continuation of his tale. When that didn’t happen, I felt somewhat off balance, as if I was being led further and further away from the “natural” path of the novel. It’s a surprisingly effective technique. Rather than come back to Bobby, though, we hear from twenty other characters who have different perspectives and degrees of knowledge.

They include Réaltín (the name means “little star”), a single mother on maternity leave from a solicitor’s office in town. Réaltín has bought one of the two completed houses on the ghost estate that Bobby’s missing boss left behind, and is feeling trapped there. Several of the other characters are utterly convinced that Bobby is having an affair with Réaltín, in spite of his obvious attachment to his wife Triona — who has the novel’s last word.

Bobby hates his father, Frank, whom he visits every day in the hope of finding him dead. When at last he does come upon the old man lifeless on the floor, there’s a blood-covered length of timber beside him, which has obviously been used to smash his skull. Bobby tells the Garda sergeant that he doesn’t know if he killed his father, but the sergeant doesn’t have much doubt: he obviously didn’t. The actual killer says that, at the moment of striking the blow, he thought he was killing his own father. Of course, the observers who were sure that Bobby was sleeping with Réaltín were equally sure that he must have done away with his father.

The killer says “I lamped him as hard as I could into the fucking bald old poll” (p. 125) with the piece of timber. This act of violence towards the novel’s end matches one at the beginning. Mickey Briars is enraged when he learns that because of the embezzlement by Pokey Burke (the owner of the building company), he won’t get a pension. As Bobby tells it:

… when he picked up a shovel and started swinging, we all ran for cover. Except poor innocent Tommy Hanrahan; he only stood grinning back to his two ears like the gom that he is.

Auld Mickey Briars lamped Timmy Hanrahan twice across both sides of his innocent young head before we subdued him. (p. 11)

Instead of taking Timmy to the hospital, they take him to the pub. After several pints, they send him home “with a bag of chips and three battered sausages and a dose of concussion that could have easily killed him” (p. 12). The “lamping” doesn’t seem to have done Timmy any permanent damage, however. Later, when he’s searching for Réaltín’s kidnapped child, the sergeant, Jim Gildea, is gets information from Timmy about a phone conversation that Timmy had overheard that leads Jim to the kidnappers. Jim comments:

That boy of the Hanrahans isn’t half as thick as people make out. And better still, people don’t edit themselves around him, thinking him to be an out and out God-help-us. That’s how he picked up on that boy’s words. The likes of Timmy do be invisible. (p. 137)

The reader already knows that one of the kidnappers is Lloyd, a self-described solipsist who chooses to believe that other people exist only in his imagination, and that any conflicts he has with others are created by himself, presumably so that he can learn from them.

I know now that all that shit was a series of tests I’d set myself. I think I failed some of them, that’s why I’m still groping about in the dark. (p. 105)

There’s another big difference between The Wild Laughter and this novel. Most of the action in Hughes’s book is set on a farm. In The Spinning Heart, though the setting is rural, it’s not agricultural. Frank’s father had inherited a farm from his own father. Although he hadn’t been a drinker before, and wasn’t one afterwards, while the farm was in his hands, he took to drinking heavily and “pissed away” his inheritance, as a deliberate rejection, “to spite his father” (p. 17), even though the old man was dead.

Many of these characters would not long before have worked in agriculture, but for the past few years they’ve been earning unprecedented amounts in building and other construction-related occupations. That, of course, is all coming to a sudden stop. Some of them have plans to move to England but not all of those are confident that there will be work for them there.

A novel that came out a year before The Spinning Heart, also set (largely) in rural Ireland, but this time featuring a farm, is Belinda McKeon’s Solace (2011). The farm is becoming economically irrelevant, however. At the end of the story, the farmer, Tom, has sold his cattle and the bales of hay to feed them that he had worked hard to save earlier in the year. He tells his son, Mark, “There’ll be other cattle” (p. 303) but it’s quite likely that there won’t be, not here.

Mark sometimes works on the farm, and seems to be good at it, but isn’t interested in taking it over when his father retires or dies. At the beginning of the novel, Mark is a graduate student in TCD, where he’s working on a doctoral thesis about Maria Edgeworth. (The farm is in a townland adjacent to Edgeworthstown.) Knowing that he only actually needs to be in Dublin for a few hours each week, his father can’t understand why Mark can’t be available whenever an extra pair of hands is needed on the farm.

A lot happens, and I don’t intend to try to summarize it all. A one-year-old baby is cut from the wreckage of a car whose other occupants, the child’s mother and grandmother, are killed. The baby is physically (and apparently otherwise) unharmed. The baby’s father finds that he has to make unexpected but fundamental changes to his life and, of course, he’s not the only one.

One of the first things that happens is that Mark meets a young woman, to whom he’s instantly attracted, at a party. They develop a relationship, he thinks, though it happens so fast that he’s not sure what it is. When they first meet, the woman, Joanne, knows who he is, though he doesn’t recognize her. She’s the daughter of a crooked solicitor, since deceased, who double-crossed Mark’s father years earlier, and whom Tom still detests, even in death.

Mark is living on his academic funding and Joanne is a trainee solicitor, badly paid and horrendously overworked, so they’re not well off, though Joanne owns a house in Stoneybatter which she inherited from her father. Late in the story, when Mark is driving down to County Longford, to the farm, listening to the radio, he wonders about the economic crisis.

He was still waiting for it to make a difference to him, this disaster that everyone was talking about, still waiting for it to make his life impossible, this collapse of everything, this end of everything. Apparently the country was dying on its feet. But things seemed strangely the same to him. (p. 294)

Early in the novel, Joanne lied to one of the two partners in the small firm where she was a trainee. The firm was acting for a fashionable restaurateur who was being sued by his mother. Having read transcripts of the evidence without being present in court, Joanne found herself sympathetic to the mother, the opposing party. After she had spoken by phone to their client’s sister, the plaintiff’s other child, who lived in the US, she lied about what the daughter had said, in a successful attempt to dissuade the partner from bringing the daughter back from the US to give evidence. The lie was a spur-of-the-moment desperate act.

If Joanne had had time to think, if she hadn’t acted impulsively, she could have achieved the same result by telling a carefully slanted version of the truth: that their client’s sister had said that both her mother and brother were accomplished compulsive liars and that Joanne was not to contact her again. It seemed likely that Joanne would get caught in the lie and her career would be sunk before it even got started. That was certainly what Mark was afraid of, when she told him. But in the event, it’s not what happened. Their client won his case (to Joanne’s chagrin) and the partner piled more work on the trainee. And Joanne was saved from a disastrous fate for a worse one.

Mark had begun his thesis confidently arguing that Maria Edgeworth was not a realist novelist, as she appears to be, but rather an experimentalist. After a year or two, it was becoming clear to him that this would not be an easy argument to make, and that he might not be all that interested in making it. After a public argument with his supervisor at the entrance to the Lecky library, in which the supervisor advises him to take a break from his thesis, Mark furiously tells the academic that he won’t bother him again. There’s no further direct reference to the thesis in the novel.

There is, however, a hint at the end of the story that Mark hasn’t finally abandoned his postgraduate work. While he is spending some time on the farm, his father notices that he has brought with him his copy of Castle Rackrent in which Joanne had, months earlier, pencilled a playful greeting.

I alluded above to the possibility that in The Wild Laughter Caoilinn Hughes implies that the crash of 2008 pushed Ireland — and especially rural Ireland — back several decades to a less developed state. If this is true, it leads to the paradox that two novels which were published years earlier, closer to the crash itself and while its effects were still being keenly felt, seem more up-to-date and forward-looking, and arguably to give a truer reflection of the current state of the country.

Editions: The Spinning Heart is cited from a Doubleday Ireland paperback, 2013, (ellipsis added); Solace is a Picador hardback, 2011.