Much has been made in recent years about the rise of the so-called 'Issues Novel’ in Ireland. Writers are embarrassed by it. Critics decry it. It almost seems as though the literati are at pains to distance themselves from anything resembling consequential writing.
When something genuinely important comes along, it can even have the inverse effect of appearing too topical for its own good. As the great Émile Zola once said about the Naturalist movement in the 19th Century: "Character and personality are shaped by history, and there are no individual heroes who transcend history."
Thankfully for Roisín O’Donnell, her debut novel Nesting navigates this tricky territory deftly. Her capacity for inhabiting the world of her protagonist Ciara is rendered down to the finest detail; from the strange, occasionally humorous trains of thought that obsess her young daughters to the subtle gestures of psychosocial control that makes Ciara’s decision to leave her husband such a painful choice. Everything here feels earned by hard-won experience.
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Listen: Roisin O'Donnell talks to Miriam O'Callaghan
O’Donnell’s navigation of Ciara’s predicament bears fruit early, as demonstrated by the first time we encounter the novel’s title during a tense standoff with abuser/husband, Ryan:
'It’s a habit that started when she was pregnant with Sophie. She used to call it ‘nesting’. That thing women do when they sense their baby is arriving soon. Grouting, hoovering, taking a mad notion to paint the backyard wall Azores Blue. Only, she didn’t sense an arrival but an impending threat. Cleaning, painting, fixing every centimetre of that house felt like the only thing that was safe.'
In the hands of a lesser writer, overtures like these run the risk of mawkishness or sentimentality. What makes them feel realistic in Nesting is O'Donnell’s ability to switch from domestic quietude to simmering violence in the space of a single line or paragraph. This is a novel that understands the often complex dynamics that underpin domestic abuse situations, offering a timely rebuttal to the simplistic adage: 'Why don’t you just leave him?’
Situations like Ciara’s are complicated by financial dependency, pregnancy and the desire for one’s children to have a stable relationship with both parents. Here, all these factors have a part to play, to say nothing of the love that stubbornly persists despite all logical alternatives pushing Ciara toward her life of independence.
Indeed, what strikes particularly poignantly aren’t the moments when Ryan’s explosive temper flares—terrifying as they are—but the fact that O’Donnell has chosen to imbue him with near-schizophrenic displays of disarming softness; his responses so often carefully calibrated and deployed to mask his abuse behind lovebombing.
For O’Donnell, abuse is presented more as an accumulation than a single identifiable act of violence. As we have seen in the horrific case of Gisèle Pelicot in France, sexual assault proliferates behind the closed doors of "respectable" pillars of the community, where men who often masquerade as doting fathers and husbands in public are capable of well-hidden acts of depravity at home.
If Nesting has any weakness then, it comes not from O’Donnell’s pitch-perfect characterisation nor from the confidence of her storytelling, but from the writing’s occasional slippage into heavy-handed signalling on the one hand and inexactitude on the other. At one point Ciara’s daughter Sophie ‘waddles away like a bad-tempered penguin’. At another, ‘there’s a gathering weight in [Ciara’s] chest, like the feeling before thunder’.
But for the most part these are quibbles. At its best, Nesting bears a striking similarity to Roddy Doyle’s Paula Spencer series in its laser-focused depiction of the queasy uncertainty surrounding abusive partnerships. I only wish that there were more visceral interventions into the national conversation around domestic violence, because—as recent statistics show about the harm done to women and girls—we need ‘Issues Novels’ in Ireland now more than ever.
Nesting is published by Simon & Schuster
