Book review: Missing the home that was escaped from

Mairéad Sweeney is a 27-year-old from Sligo working as a wardrobe assistant in a run-down theatre in London’s West End. 

She is the narrator of this carefully-crafted first novel set between March 28 and April 8, 2002.

It is Mairéad’s first job in London, fulfilling her wish to escape Ireland, yet she is frequently overwhelmed by loneliness: 

“The need to go home, to hear someone with my own accent saying things I understood, hit me like grief.”

She obviously loves her job and describes her hectic daily rounds with great relish. 

Her chores range from hand-washing underwear to dropping shoes at the cobblers then buying seamed stockings in a sex shop before returning to base to cut a pattern for a pair of replacement gloves. 

She is obviously good at her work, and liked by her colleagues.

The atmosphere of backstage camaraderie, the sense of teamwork in the face of tight budgets and large egos is well conveyed. 

Mairéad encounters much kindness from her fellow-workers and from other Londoners, but does not always recognise it as such.

She is so immersed in the nightly performances of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya that it seems to comment on her own problems:

 “Sonya Alexandrovna would ask Doctor Mikhail Astrov the same question tonight that she asked him every night: ‘Why are you destroying yourself?’ I don’t know, Sonya, I don’t know.”

In the spare time between her split-shifts, she explores central London on foot, shocked to find a statue of Cromwell in Westminster: “…when I read his name my hands tightened into fists and I might have growled.”

The year 2002 was a difficult time to be Irish in London, no one flaunted it. 

There were no public litter bins “because of the IRA”, and when Mairéad’s mother forgets her luggage on leaving Stansted, Mairéad assumes it has been destroyed on suspicion of containing a bomb.

She soon encounters English racism in which to be Irish is to be backward and ignorant. 

When the theatre’s director sees her using a mug instead of a wine glass at an impromptu toast he comments: “Drinking from pottery, I see. How Irish.”

As Mairéad’s life hurtles towards a crisis, its progress is interrupted by the news that her grandmother has died suddenly in Leitrim. 

She books herself on to the next flight to Knock Airport.

Thus ends Part one, London. Part two, Ireland, is her account of the wake and funeral of her grandmother in her home, and its effect on a typical ‘Irish Family from Hell’ — her downtrodden mother, her nice cousin Olwen, sympathetic aunt Veronica, creepy cousin Iggy, helpless Uncle Thomas, granny’s only son, and Felim Sweeney, her overbearing father, fond of a drop. 

The friends and neighbours “lean in to talk” as plates of sandwiches are shared.

Mairéad’s narrator voice changes too, more confident, even aggressive back in her home place. 

It is very well done, even though the tale of predatory abuse over two generations is all too familiar. 

But for this reader at least, having just mastered the long list of characters in the London section, and their banter, this big new cast, an extended Irish family mourning their matriarch, was just too much.

Elaine Garvey, who has had stories published in Stinging Fly and Winter Papers, is especially good at dialogue, with a witty, often biting turn of phrase. I look forward to what she does next.