Book review:  Immersive novel that shows talents of Mulkerns on centenary of her birth

A young woman, Maeve Cusack, anxious to avoid going home, cycles the road from her school in Dublin, and climbs Howth Head, her mind full of doubts about her future. 

She’s joined by her boyfriend Diarmuid, who shares her passion for literature and culture. 

They’re ideally suited, but while he is set for university, Maeve fears that she’ll fail her scholarship and end up mouldering in the civil service. 

So starts A Time Unworn, this magical coming of age story which was first published in 1951.

Val Mulkerns followed her highly acclaimed debut with nine other books which earned her membership of the then newly formed Aosdána. 

And this new edition, published on the centenary of her birth, is enhanced by Carlo Gebler’s fascinating foreword. 

He knew the family as a small boy living in Rathgar, as his parents, Ernest Gebler and Edna O’Brien, were close friends of the author. 

He describes their house, with typewriters standing waiting, pens lying around, and hardback books on tables and sofas with their spines bent back.

A Time Outworn is finely crafted. The lyrical opening gives us a sure sense of place, and when Maeve arrives home to find her father arguing with his friend about England’s dominance versus Irish patriotism, we learn of her background too — and her closeness to her mother, brother, and sister.

The scenes on the beach where Maeve and her friends sun themselves, and show signs of rivalry, are so astute and so universal, they could have been written about teenagers today. 

Talking of one, Máire Lavin, Maeve thinks, ‘She was the sort of girl you wanted to pet like an animal, and save from any rough hands’.

Máire chooses a white dress more suited for a communion than a dance which sees her friends decked out in silvered sophistication. 

Those beautifully described scenes, where they’re fighting for mirror space, are reminiscent of the writings of Rosamund Lehmann.

I could identify strongly; the underpinning of Maeve’s constant daydreams brought me sharply back to my own teenage years. 

Falling asleep one night, missing Diarmuid, Maeve muses, ‘a human face pushed away every other thought and floated dreamily beside mine on the borders of sleeping and waking’.

Life at the end of the Second World War though, was not all the stuff of dreams. 

When she’s dancing with Garrett, a man who was at Dunkirk, he tells her of seeing a friend shot through the head, and she realises there is more to war than ‘dark bread and no oranges and my father and George Henderson shouting at each other across a room’.

Turning down Diarmuid’s proposal of marriage, Maeve escapes to a town in Tipperary to run the library, and the novel takes on a new dimension, highlighting the author’s genius for conjuring the pettiness and prejudices of small-town living. 

She misses home, but when things with Diarmuid take a dark turn, she can’t bring herself to go there.

I adored this novel with its constant references to Yeats, Joyce, and Synge. 

An elderly Maud Gonne makes an appearance, and when Maeve befriends her fellow lodger, a schoolteacher who forms a drama group, there is a deep and humorous discussion around suitable, and unsuitable plays.

Although she’s a multi layered, complex character, I felt infuriated with Maeve’s melancholic passivity at times. 

And the conclusion of the novel, even before the final twist didn’t quite convince me, but that’s a small quibble. 

I felt totally immersed in this novel from the first page to the last, and am now seeking out other novels by this author.