Whenever I see a master craftworker (potter, carpenter, whoever), I’m always impressed by how they make their craft seem effortless. Donal Ryan is such a craftworker. He writes so that the words flow effortlessly on to the page, beautifully crafted and immensely evocative.
Everyparagraph is like a prose-poem with each sentence creating a scene but without overwriting the images. It’s effortless to read even though Ryan tends towards the long sentence school of writing. He does this by tagging on multiple sub-clauses onto the main clause. However, this is not self-conscious experimentalism but a skilful way of drawing you into the story he’s telling you. Imagine yourself sat by the fireside while someone spins you a yarn. The yarn that Ryan is spinning is about four generations of women – Nana, Mother, Saoirse (main character) and her daughter, Pearl. The novel is structured through many short vignettes which tells the ups and downs of their rural lives. This is social realism telling the everyday stories of their hard-knock lives.
Any charm or quaintness of rural life is balance through the rough and raw events of a family getting by on the basics. This mitigates against any sense of cliched Oirishness. The tales of these women and their brothers, Paudie and Chris, are sometimes sad and heart-breaking, sometimes violent and foulmouthed.
But at times, I was longing for a bigger sense of a plot to be developed and for the vignettes to pick up a direction. But as Saoirse grew and developed as a mother and explored her own emotional fulfilment, I could see that a more formal plot would have worked against this organic portrait of four generations.
This is really great writing which I enjoyed immensely. If you feel that a full length novel of a family in rural Ireland composed of many short scenes is for you, then certainly give it a try.