fiction

The Music Shop, by Rachel Joyce

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I’ve written before about Joyce’s novels The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry and Miss Benson’s Beetle, so I looked forward to reading this, her fourth novel. It was even better than I expected.

In London of 1988, Frank owns a record shop—yes, vinyl only—on a street where the buildings are literally falling apart and the shops all struggling. His superpower is to find the perfect piece of music for whoever comes into his shop. They may know what they want, but he knows what they need.

Frank had helped them through illness, grief, loss of confidence and jobs, as well as the more daily things like football results and the weather. Not that he knew about all those things, but really it was a matter of listening, and he had endless patience.

The other shopkeepers are drawn with respect and compassion. Mr. Novak the baker, Maude the tatooist, Father Anthony selling religious bookmarks and other iconography, the Williams brothers who run a funeral home and are often seen holding hands: they are given to us in their fullness. This is an approach I noted in Joyce’s other books, the way she respects the voice of even the minor characters and her tone. She doesn’t make fun of the characters or look down on them.

The push by a development company to buy out tenants and shop owners alike, in order to tear down all the buildings to make way for luxury apartments, strains the communal bonds of the street whose inhabitants have previously been so supportive of each other.

Then a German woman in a green coat faints outside Frank’s shop. Ilse Brauchmann slowly becomes enmeshed in the community, with her mysterious background and amazing—to Frank at least—ability to fix anything mechanical. Eventually she asks Frank to give her music lessons.

The true joy of the book for me is listening to Frank talk about music. His sensitive descriptions, which have almost nothing to do with music theory and much to do with emotion and theme, have sent me back to pieces I thought I knew well and to others that were new to be. He says:

‘Music comes out of silence and at the end it goes back to it. It’s a journey . . . the silence at the beginning of a piece of music is always different from the silence at the end . . . Because if you listen, the world changes.’

As a writer, I was fascinated by Joyce’s interweaving of all these different strands to make an irresistable tapestry. I also noted the way she teased out the characters’ backgrounds with the same care as Frank layering in the context of a piece of music, and thus providing us with the same kind of insight.

At this time, when so much seems to be wrong with the world, this novel gave me comfort, reminding me of our common humanity and how we find it through our emotions in music, mutual concerns, and each other.

What novel by Rachel Joyce have you read? What did you think of it?

Terrace Story, by Hilary Leichter

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Imagine that you are young and living in a tiny apartment with your spouse. Then there’s a new baby, and it feels like you don’t have room to turn around. The windows look out on other walls, and it’s all so cramped and impossible. Then your friend Stephanie comes to visit, and when she opens a closet door, instead of broom and dustmop, there is a terrace: a large terrace, with a table and chairs and green plants and a gorgeous view.

Whoa, I thought, as dazzled by the idea as the characters are by the sudden sunlight. Impatiently turning the pages, I was terrified that the rest of the story wouldn’t hold up. Reader, it did. It knocked my socks off.

By story I mean the first of the four interlocking stories that make up this book. I don’t want to go into too much detail, and urge you not to read more about the book. Just jump in and let yourself be surprised and saddened and swept away.

Leichter finds imaginative yet concrete ways to get us to think about love and time and space and memory—those ineffable concepts. The book is funny and unsettling, sweet and compelling.

Enough with the adjectives. This may be the shortest review I’ve written, because I don’t know how to write about it or analyse it without giving too much away. I’ll just say that magic happens when the author unleashes her imagination and invites us into the story.

What book have you read recently that knocked your socks off?

The Book of Goose, by Yiyun Li

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I’ve been a fan of Yiyun Li’s writing ever since I picked up a copy of her first book A Thousand Years of Good Prayers in Toronto shortly after it was released in 2006. In her latest novel we meet Agnès and Fabienne in 1950s rural France. Only 13, they have already seen a lot of death, not just the war but the death of Agnès’s brother after his return from a German prisoner of war camp and of Fabienne’s older sister in childbirth.

The two are inseparable, linked in one of those intense adolescent friendships—do boys have them too?—that ignore the rest of the world. Fabienne, the leader, boils over with mischievous, sometimes violent games that Agnès eagerly joins. She says, “I gave Fabienne what she wanted: her Agnès. I did not give this Agnès to others, but what they asked of me I did my best to accommodate.”

Agnès says of her friend, “Some people are born with a special kind of crystal instead of a heart . . . That crystal in place of a heart—it makes things happen. To others.” Fabienne yearns for the excitement of the world outside their village while Agnès yearns merely to be with her friend, to live in the world Fabienne creates.

Then Fabienne comes up with a scheme for the two of them to write a book. She dictates her dark stories—an American GI is executed; a young woman suffocates her newborn and leaves it in a pig trough—for Agnès to record in her excellent handwriting. Fabienne decides to drag in the local postmaster, reasoning that as a widower with no friends, he must be lonely and bored.

What happens with the book and how it affects the girls’ friendship follow. As shown in the quote above, the book is narrated by Agnès, but an adult Agnès, married and living in Pennsylvania where she raises geese.

In my writing community, we have been talking some about how to sustain momentum in a story when you have a passive protagonist. One way is to have a mesmerizing voice, which this story certainly has. I kept trying to put it down in order to tackle more of my to-do list, but was unable to stay away.

It’s an unusual voice and an odd story. What I saw in it, and treasured, were the kinds of friendships I remember from my youth, and also the shifting of power within those friendships over the years. I saw the yearning for freedom, and the question of how much freedom is enough.

As I was reading, it seemed a meandering story, but in retrospect it comes together as an astute psychological portrait, a fairy tale, a story of secrets and social pressures. It will not leave me alone.

Have you read anything by Yiyun Li?

The Final Case, by David Guterson

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The unnamed narrator of Guterson’s latest novel is a writer who no longer writes. Like many retirees, he finds that house projects and what my friend calls life maintenance tasks quickly swell to fill up his days. Then his 84-year-old father calls to tell him that two things have happened: a tree has fallen in his yard, and he has had a minor car accident.

The tree is not important but the car is, because Royal is still working as a lawyer and now has no way to get to his office. The narrator agrees to be his chauffeur and quickly becomes caught up in one of his father’s current cases.

This setup for the story had me eager to read more. We have the contrast between the two men, one seemingly determined to continue working till his last day on earth and the other setting aside his career and seemingly not missing it at all. We have the loving relationship between them while navigating the problems of an aging parent: Royal decides that even when the car is fixed he should no longer be driving.

And we have the case. Abeba, a young Ethiopian orphan adopted by a fundamentalist Christian couple has died of abuse. The father was at work during the critical time, so it is the mother who is on trial. When no one wants to defend her, Royal agrees to do it, not because he thinks she is innocent, but because he believes everyone deserves a defender and that having one makes the prosecution present a solid case and makes the court apply the law fairly and accurately.

Beyond all these intriguing elements, we have Guterson’s mesmeric flow of well-wrought sentences that kept me reading past every self-imposed deadline. He captures voices of individual characters beautifully, from the gracious, considered words of the elderly lawyer to the Fox News Entertainment Channel-inspired courtroom rant of the accused’s mother. Guterson also gives the narrator a voice that is quiet, and intelligent, while his openness and emotional depth provide a surprising drive.

On another level, the narrator being a writer brings in questions about the uses of fiction and how to recognise it. He says after telling us right off that he used to write fiction:

If that leaves you wondering about this book—wondering if I’m kidding, or playing a game, or if I’ve wandered into the margins of metafiction or the approximate terrain of autofiction—everything here is real.

The story carries the question of how to distinguish fact from fiction into other realms, the trial testimony, for instance, and even within ourselves.

The fact that people do what they do, or think what they think, or say what they say–it can be so inconsistent with their view of themselves that they deny to themselves that it ever happened. They invent a story for themselves in which they didn’t think or feel or do or say anything wrong, and that story becomes reality for them, so real that they’ll defend it to the bitter end, even when the facts in the real world say otherwise. They play this trick on themselves, because if they don’t, they’ll have to accept that they’re not the good person they thought they were.

Guterson and his wife themselves adopted a child from Ethiopia, and the case in this book is apparently based on a real trial that occurred in 2011 involving another Ethiopian orphan. However, this novel is not a courtroom drama. Well, some of it is. And I felt I knew where I was when the courtroom testimony began. But then Guterson pulls the rug out from under the reader, abandoning the trial itself to accompany the narrator to his sister’s tearoom and other activities. At first this third part of the book seemed to me a jumble of unrelated, if beautifully written, anecdotes. Looking back after finishing the book, though, it came together.

One member of my book club was disturbed by the way the father-son relationship overshadowed the story of the young girl, Abeba. While I understand that was not the book Guterson set out to write, I did feel Abeba was given short shrift in the story, was in fact merely a pawn in the story of the father and son. Maybe that is Guterson’s point, or one of them: that no matter how much our hearts may ache for others, in the end we are the protagonists of our own story. Perhaps this is part of his questioning the uses of fiction.

I recently read an excellent essay by Sallie Tisdale in Harper’s Magazine on memory and memoir that questions the idea of autobiographical memory: that our life experiences link together in a narrative arc, and that they become the basis of our identity.

Perhaps Guterson is exploring some of the same questions. If you, too, find such ideas interesting and are willing to immerse yourself in well-wrought prose, I suggest reading this novel all the way through, and then giving yourself time to ponder your reactions.

What novel have you enjoyed that took you by surprise?

The Testament of Mary, by Colm Tóibín

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There are some authors whose every book is a must-read for me. Tóibín is one, ever since I picked up a battered copy of The Heather Blazing at a used book and tool sale in a market town in England twenty years ago. I persuaded my book club to read it as well and they’ve gone on to enjoy other novels by him. You’ll find several of his books in my blog: Brooklyn, New Ways to Kill Your Mother, The Empty Family, Nora Webster, and The Magician.

Not having been raised Catholic and a longtime feminist, I’ve given little thought to the culture that has built up around Mary, aside from discarding the stereotype of her as docile and obedient that many people hold up as the ideal toward which all women should strive. As a mother, I could feel her horror and grief at the death of her son, but that made me dislike even more the priestly glorification of human sacrifice. Well, I guess they would say half-human.

However, this first-person narrative captured me immediately, giving me a new and completely plausible image of an historical Mary. Here, she is older and alone, living in Ephesus, a city known for its Temple of Artemis, located in what is now Turkey, thus far enough away from Rome to offer safe haven from her Roman pursuers. There, she is visited by two of her son’s disciples who watch and support her even as they question her repeatedly about her son’s life to bolster their own narratives. She says:

They think that I do not know the elaborate nature of their desires. But nothing escapes me now except sleep . . . They are too locked into their vast and insatiable needs and too dulled by the remnants of a terror we all felt then to have noticed that I remember everything. Memory fills my body as much as blood and bones.

She considers those who followed her son a “group of misfits he gathered around him, men who could not look a woman in the eye,” and judges herself with the same brutal clarity. In this slim novella, she tells us her story, the one she holds in every part of her body.

And it is an utterly credible story. If there truly was an historical Jesus—his name is never mentioned in this book—then this portrait of a happy, playful child grown into a cold and distant man is one I can believe. It is the story of too many men, and a few women, who have embraced the portrait of themselves they see in others’ eyes and the power that comes with it.

It is not the story that has come down to us; that’s the one crafted by his followers, the one she disputes. It is still an enthralling one. A mother, telling us about her son—her son. She discounts the stories she hears about his so-called miracles as exaggerations by the crowd that follows him. Even her glancing acquaintance with the results, such as meeting the undead Lazarus, are ambiguous.

Tóibín has crafted a tender and agonizing book that has changed my view of Mary and her son.

What novel of Colm Tóibín’s have you read? What did you think about it?

Haven, by Emma Donoghue

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My horror at the devastation wrought by evangelical “Christians” (who eschew the basic tenets of Christianity) in the U.S. made this novel tough going for me. I couldn’t get past my outrage that anyone would submit themselves to torture and starvation in the name of religion when salvation—an earthly one to be sure—was so easily available.

Donoghue, author of Room, has constructed another story where people are confined in a tiny location, dependent on the whims of an all-powerful tyrant. In 600 A.D. Cluain Mhic Nóis, an Irish monastery, hosts a visiting holy man, perhaps the holiest man on earth: Artt, legendary for having read every book in existence and surviving the plague with the loss only of a finger.

While there, Artt has a dream—surely a holy vision!—that he should found a new monastery on a remote island off the Irish coast, far from the earthly temptations that have, in his view, corrupted Cluain Mhic Nóis. The dream/vision/mandate from God further commands that he take two of the monks: Cormac, an older man who came late to religion and is fond of telling stories, and young, impressionable Trian, who was given to the monastery at 13.

They fetch up on a stony isle that it is hard to imagine anyone could survive a week on, though the author’s note assures us that it is indeed the site of a medieval monastery. The fascination for me was in the various ways they—mostly Cormac to be honest—find to survive in this hostile environment. Trian, too, captures the heart with their sweetness and love for everything—birds, fellows, mussels, God. Artt is just, in my opinion, a self-righteous, narcissistic blowhard, convinced that he alone is the conduit of God’s word.

Well, obviously I’m the wrong audience for this book. I could hardly bear continuing to read of their hardships, knowing that civilisation—with, sure, its evils, but also actual sustenance and shelter—is only a short boat ride away. The writing is gorgeous but the story infuriating.

I have my moments of thinking like Artt that the world is incurably decadent, and wanting to preserve some small piece of what life could really be like. But this is not the way. And I’m far too practical to take my minions, even if I could bear to have minions, away from necessities like food, water and shelter to create religious monuments. Nor could I ever sacrifice others to my vision of my own greatness.

So, while I admire the prose, the story left me cold. No, not cold, but a turbulent mix of emotions: frustration, anger, sadness, a hint of longing. The book challenged me to think outside my own box, a challenge I guess I failed. Stil, I’m left thinking of John Lennon’s Imagine: no religions, nothing to die for.

Have you read a novel that challenged you?

The Fell, by Sarah Moss

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In the COVID lockdown. I was one of the lucky ones: healthy, able to work at home, and enough of an introvert to relish the time alone. Not everyone was so lucky, as I was well aware. Every say I saw and thought about the mail carriers, trash collectors, and delivery personnel on our otherwise empty street.

When I finally began to venture out to the grocery store, I wore a mask to protect the cashiers and other employees. I felt sad and angry that so many people—including my own sons and daughter-in-law—had no choice but to put their lives and those of their families on the line.

Now, a few years later, I barely remember those times, so I was eager to pick up this brief novel by Sarah Moss, whose Ghost Wall I had previously enjoyed.

Set in a village in the Peak district of England during the early lockdown, the story moves between four characters. Fittingly, the four almost never interact with each other, so we meet each one alone and plunge deeply into their psyche, creating a surprisingly gripping psychological novel.

Kate is a progressive single mother who has been exposed to COVID, so must self-isolate for two weeks, along with her teenaged son Matt. Since cafe where she works is shut down, they are struggling financially, but worse for her is the confinement to the house and yard. Matt is happy to blow off his online lessons and spend his days immersed in video games and helping his mom around the house, but she is not. Devoted to the outdoors, she is used to rambling the fells every day and feels suffocated and nearly out of her mind.

One day, near dusk, she grabs her backpack—always filled with the essentials dedicated hikers know to carry—and sets out for a brief walk on the nearby fell, reasoning to herself that she will almost certainly be the only out there, so she won’t endanger anyone.

When she doesn’t return, Matt is frantic but doesn’t want to get her in trouble by reporting her missing. Their next-door neighbor Alice, retired and with health problems, sees Kate go, but for the same reason doesn’t report her. Still, when Kate doesn’t return Alice worries about Matt, and eventually calls and persuades him to report his mother as missing.

The Mountain Rescue Team is summoned, including Rob, a divorced father whose teenaged daughter is furious about his departure on this rare night together. He is our fourth person, weighing his responsibility to his daughter against the missing woman’s safety, his commitment to the team, and his own desire to be out on the fell.

This is the thread through the four people’s stories: how do we balance our wants and needs with our responsibilities to others, not just family, but the person next door, the cashier at the village shop, the team that has to come out on a cold night to scour the fell?

Alice mourns for Matt, left alone through the long night, as the team searches for his mother, but is unsure about going to be with him, given her health problems and his exposure to the virus. Matt is unsure how to interact with the rescuers. And they, if they are lucky enough to find Kate, will have to touch this person who may have COVID and then go home to their families. Kate must wrestle with her own guilt and possible mortality.

Having hiked those fells myself just a few months ago, I was especially invested in this story. I saw how easily things could go wrong, even for the most experienced hiker. I met people on the trail who set off this way and that, determined to explore remote paths, and a woman who swam alone every day all the way around a large, usually deserted, mountain tarn. I knew about the Mountain Rescue Team—bless them!—and was doubly diligent about being careful on the slippery stones on the steep fells. I did not want to be carried out with a broken ankle!

Moss set herself a challenge with this book. A story about isolation and boredom could fall apart so easily, especially one with almost no scenes showing characters interacting. However, she succeeds brilliantly, with suspense building throughout the brief time frame of the story, abetted by the ticking clock of injury and exposure.

The characters come alive, convincingly portrayed in their intensely personal sections. Each of them will haunt me for some time. And each is wrestling with an issue that all of us—COVID or no COVID—are navigating every day: how to balance individual freedom with collective responsibility.

Have you read a novel that illuminates our particular moment in time?

The Maid, by Nita Prose

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NOTE: There may be some spoilers in this review.

My first reaction to my local book club’s choice for this month was that it was a shoddy knockoff version of the delightful Japanese bestseller Convenience Store Woman. Like that subtle, smart novel, Prose’s protagonist is a young woman apparently on the autism spectrum who works in a menial job and loves it. Unfortunately, The Maid doesn’t measure up.

Molly Gray works as a chambermaid in a five-star hotel where she enjoys restoring each room to “a state of perfection.” Less enjoyable is the disdain with which most of her colleagues treat her—referring to her a weirdo, a robot, a Roomba—though not to her face. Still, she calls on the platitudes and proverbs she learned from her gram, recently deceased, to keep her world in order. Then one day she enters a room to clean it and finds the guest staying in it dead on the bed.

Billed as a cosy mystery, the book fails to be either. True, there is a death and cups of tea, but there is no intrepid sleuth tracking down the killer. There are no clues to follow, no investigation. Instead, the story limps through a threadbare plot, every step of it embarrassingly obvious. There are a few gratuitous “twists” at the very end which come across as cheap tricks because they are not integrated with the plot at all.

Not only is the plot childishly simple, but the language is in the middle grade range (appropriate for age 8-12), often even simpler than that. And that gets to the worst aspect of the book. Since it’s quite obvious to the reader what’s going on, the plot is not the driving force in the book. Neither is the setting, which is barely sketched in. The people in the story are caricatures and stereotypes, either all good or all bad, so nothing there to keep the reader going. The only thing left is Molly herself.

Yes, the force propelling the story is the reader’s amusement as Molly constantly misinterprets what’s obvious to all of us neurotypical folks and responds with prim childish speeches. Making fun of neurodivergent people is a bizarre—and repulsive—choice for the basis of a book. I’m aghast that so many people seem to think this is just great, and that the book has won multiple awards, achieved bestseller status, and will be made into a film.

Making Molly be so childish and naïve seems like the author knows nothing about autism. We talk about cultural appropriation in literature. If a neurotypical author is going to write a first-person novel in the voice of a neurodivergent person, they ought to at least be knowledgeable about the condition. There’s also the way Juan Manuel, who works in the hotel’s kitchen, is presented as naive, unintelligent and helpless, summoning the most despicable stereotypes about immigrants and Mexicans. The police too are shown as bumbling and cruel.

In addition to the above concerns, there are gaping holes in the logic of this story, For example, Molly bounces back and forth from clueless to astute and back again. She tells us about her condition, but sometimes doesn’t show it in her behaviour. Also, no police detective arresting a young woman in her pajamas, would cart her off to jail without enabling her to get dressed. Here, Molly even has to appear in court in her jail-begrimed pajamas, like that would actually happen.

Maids do not trundle their carts through the lobbies of five-star hotels or leave them outside the door to the bar. Nefarious boyfriends are not able to clean out a person’s entire savings account at an ATM in one fell swoop; there are limits on how much you can take out at a time. Plus, how is it that criminals can be running a drug ring in a fancy hotel without anyone noticing? Where are the security people?

Most of all, how is it that no one, from Molly’s childhood teachers to her co-workers to anyone on the police force, recognises that she is neurodivergent?

I am baffled by the praise heaped on this book. As I read it, I alternated between boredom and outrage. Of course, even though it’s a first novel, the author is a longtime editor and, at the time it was published, vice president and editorial director at Simon & Schuster, so she knows a few people.

There are some cute things in the story, like the devotion of Molly and her gram to the Olive Garden and the old tv Show Columbo. But that’s not enough to make up for the story’s weaknesses.

What story have you read with a neurodivergent narrator? What did you think of it?

The Years, by Annie Ernaux

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Writing guru Donald Maass—writer, agent, and writing teacher—reminds us to include what’s going on in the world in our stories, partly because our characters will probably be thinking about current events and reacting to them. Mostly, though, because including specific details and big-picture events helps make the world of our story seem real to the reader.

In this book, Ernaux has gone further, focusing on the larger life of a society and placing the life of one woman within that.

. . . the idea had come to her to write “a kind of woman’s destiny” set between 1940 and 1986.

Ernaux’s genre-bending experiment adds a new dimension to the field of life writing. She goes beyond memoir—a subjective view of events in the author’s personal life—and autofiction—a reexamination and fictionalisation of those events—to create a new form that melds both of these with sociology and history. She has captured the sweep of the lifetime simultaneously with that of a person and a generation.

Everything will be erased in a second. The dictionary of words amassed between cradle and deathbed, eliminated. All there will be is silence and no words to say it. Nothing will come out of the open mouth, neither I nor me. Language will continue to put the world into words. In conversation around a holiday table, we will be nothing but a first name, increasingly faceless, until we vanish into the vast anonymity of a distant generation.

Time is the only narrative structure in this collage of private memories, public events, photos, songs, brand names, television, advertising, headlines. There’s no plot, no protagonist, no story question. Instead, we are given “abbreviated memories” spun together, some personal and some common.

It will be a slippery narrative, composed in an unremitting continuous tense, absolute, devouring the present as it goes.

I especially like the way Ernaux, looking back on a long life, refers to the past as a series of “palimpsests.” It’s an effective way to describe the veils that layer over each other as we try to recall how we were.

At first, I felt overwhelmed by the flow of historical events, popular culture, and experiences. I could barely grasp each fragment before it was replaced by another, perhaps because I was listening to the audio version, beautifully performed by Anna Bentinck. Eventually, though, I began to recognise how artfully they had been assembled to create a continuous narrative.

More importantly, I came to feel a part of the story, engrossed in the passing decades and fascinated by the ways my own life interacted with this collective story, merging and sliding apart, only to merge again and again slip away. I began to feel as though she were telling me the story of my own life, with occasional diversions.

Perhaps I should have first mentioned the unique point of view. Unlike most life writing, there is no “I” in the book. Instead—and fittingly for the story of a generation—it is narrated by “we,” as though by a chorus of voices. Apparently, in the original French version, the pronoun used is “on” which is the generic he/she that English is lacking, though it could be translated as “one.” The translator, Alison L. Strayer, has chosen instead to use “we,” which works brilliantly to capture the voice of the collective sections.

Some parts are about a specific woman, spoken of as “she.” As she nears the end of life, she begins to write this book to defy death’s erasure.

By retrieving the memory of collective memory in an individual memory, she will capture the lived dimension of History. This will not be a work of remembrance in the usual sense, aimed at putting a life into story, creating an explanation of self. She will go within herself only to retrieve the world, the memory and imagination of its bygone days, grasp the changes in ideas, beliefs, and sensibility, the transformation of people and the subjects that she has seen.

I plan to delve into other books by Ernaux, winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature. I can see why this particular book was longlisted for the 2019 International Man Booker Prize. Without getting into the controversy over whether it qualifies as fiction (a requirement for the Booker), I have to rank it high on my list of best books ever. To reach into my own past: it blew my mind.

Have you read a book by Annie Ernaux? What did you think about it?

Old God’s Time, by Sebastian Barry

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Tom Kettle is a retired Irish detective, living out by the coast, in a lean-to attached to an old castle. In retirement, he does nothing or, as he says, stays “stationary, happy and useless.” For nine months he has treasured his empty days, when they are interrupted by two junior detectives appearing at his door.

They’ve come to ask for his help with an old case, one Tom worked on: the murder of a priest who had been accused of abusing children. But this is no police procedural, with a brilliant sleuth and a puzzle for the reader to figure out.

There is a puzzle for sure, but much of it has to do with how much Tom can rely on his own thoughts. His mind moves plausibly between day and dream, present and past, until the reader is left wondering whether a visitor is real or a ghost, if things happened the way Tom described them yesterday to the way he describes them today.

He’s buried under the weight of the past. The abuse he endured in the orphanage, witnessing the sexual assault of boys “with the light in their eyes put out” by the priests was still not as awful as his wife’s suffering in the convent. Later, he thought they’d outrun the priests and the horrors, him doing well in the Garda, June raising their two smart and wonderful children. But those cautiously happy years have been erased by the repeated traumas of his police work and by his unbearable losses.

His memory slips around like a Rubik’s cube, realigning sometimes in a new pattern or falling into chaos. He cannot trust his own mind, his own senses. He becomes friends with another tenant of the castle, a cellist—or was that a dream? Tom often hears the cellist practicing Bruch’s Opus 47, an adagio based on the Kol Nidre, a Hebrew and Aramaic declaration that is associated with the “day of atonement” in the Jewish calendar.

Just as Tom navigates his slippery sense of reality, the reader is carried from a scene of pure realism into stream of consciousness into dreams and memories. It’s a brilliantly written book. I had to pay attention, and sometimes be patient, but I never lost the thread of the story. I wondered at some of the detours, but in the end could see they were all necessary.

This is a story about trauma, how it is carried in the body and the mind, how it endures into the next generation. Tom Kettle has his code. He struggles to hold onto his integrity even as he tries to sort out in his own mind what is true and what is not.

In my book club we often talk about how some novels require an extra effort from the reader, a bit more thought, a little more patience. I won’t deny that Barry’s novel is difficult to read, both because of its slippery narrative and the terrible descriptions of abuse, but it is well worth the effort. It’s unforgettable.

Have you read a novel by Sebastian Barry? What did you think about it?