Elaine Feeney's new novel is a masterclass in Irish storytelling, combining good elements from canonical classics like Anne Enright’s The Gathering and John McGahern’s That They May Face the Rising Sun with her own intuitive sensibility about the contemporary west of Ireland to deliver a novel which manages to eschew cliché.
Yes, there is the familiar ‘return of the native’ narrative. Yes, there is bereavement, heartbreak and solitude; so much that, at times, protagonist Claire O’Connor’s reckoning with her difficult past threatens to tip into sentimentality. But it never does. Feeney leaves enough of Claire’s foibles intact - her self-righteousness, her latent gifted school-child predilection for quoting Yeats and Lady Gregory - that we end up encountering a breakdown which feels terrifyingly close to the real thing.
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Listen: Oliver Callan talks to Elaine Feeney about her new novel
Claire is a forty-something writer and lecturer, who has been forced by grief to return from London to the farm she grew up on near Athenry, Co. Galway. Her mother is dead and her relationship with long term English boyfriend Tom is on the rocks. After its initial collapse when she storms out of their shared flat, seemingly for good, she learns that Tom has followed her to a nearby cottage in the west of Ireland; one which has been gifted to him rent-free by a wealthy female patron.
"I imagined the kind of woman who… was bright, and perhaps she was scrawny with a thigh gap, smart shoes, minimal jewelry - and before sleep, I wondered, did he f**k her or just pretend to want to?"
What makes Feeney's characterisation so refreshing is that she doesn’t expect her reader to like - much less root for - her protagonist
Differences in grief are rendered sharply from person to person and region to region. In sister-in-law Lara, we have the sophisticated Dubliner’s impatient need for closure. In Tom, we have the stiff upper lip English need to endure and keep up appearances. In Claire, Brian and Conor, we have the raw thing - the highs and lows, the jagged rocks, itchy scrub and salty air of emotions so unrefined they could have come out of the land itself - until we’re left with nothing less than the near-disintegration of a whole family.
Remembering that Tom begins the novel as Claire’s long-term boyfriend, his initial detachment from the catastrophe of her mother’s death is heightened by the fact that he delivers his condolences by phone call. "Look, I am sure this can’t be easy on you," he says. "I can’t imagine - Oh sugar, Claire, I am - I’m sorry but I have to run, I’m launching Steve’s book in five and they’re calling me… Such bad timing."
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Listen: RTÉ Arena reviews Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way
It should come as no surprise that Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way is replete with badly-behaved men. Claire’s violently abusive father hangs like a dark cloud over much of the narrative, while her younger brother Brian detaches himself emotionally. Her older brother Conor prefers to abuse alcohol as a coping mechanism for loss, such that each sibling becomes illustrative of a different strand of changing aspirations for different Irish classes and generations.
Where the ownership of land once represented security and fulfillment for small-holders like Claire’s father and grandfather, for the university-educated siblings it is a ‘noose’ that fastens their ambition. There is even a shrewd reversal of the Mother Ireland trope, where Claire’s father becomes so tied up in the land that it eventually leaves him embittered, angry, patriarchal and lonely. He debases his reputation by agreeing to sell a black mare to representatives of Queen Elizabeth II, and when that goes wrong, he unleashes a sustained physical assault on his wife; one we are given to understand is emblematic of the norm.
Not that Claire isn’t filled with faults of a different kind. What makes Feeney’s characterisation so refreshing is that she doesn’t expect her reader to like - much less root for - her protagonist; preferring instead to insinuate self-examination from her audience. Claire is so frequently high-minded in her wrongheadedness that all we can do is be compelled; watch as the car crash spins spectacularly over the road, feeling every nauseating turn as it rolls toward conclusion.
Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way is published by Vintage
