THE WILD LAUGHTER
By Caoilinn Hughes
The millennial prowl of the Celtic Tiger across Ireland, its appetite for greedy investors, and its subsequent capture and demise, may have caused indescribable suffering but, like any catastrophe, it has spawned some notable fiction. Novelists like Paul Murray, Claire Kilroy and Donal Ryan have examined the mentality of a nation that allowed avarice to flourish so unconstrained.
The Tiger roars again in Caoilinn Hughes’s second novel, set in Roscommon soon after the crash, through the voice of Doharty Black. Doharty is the younger of two farm sons, whose family has been hit hard by both the financial downturn and illness. The novel opens with the death of the family patriarch, the “Chief,” a fairly benign presence in a story that, in less original hands, might have offered us another Bull McCabe lording over his family with cruelty and violence. Two more misfortunes follow quickly: the collapse of the country, when the life savings of tens of thousands disappear, and the brutal slaughter of a flock of sheep, recounted with menacing delight.
The effect of the recession on everyday people is of ongoing concern to Hughes — it was a central feature of her debut, “Orchid and the Wasp” — but whereas the heroine of that novel left her homeland behind in search of a new life, Doharty and his brother, Cormac, are firmly rooted in the soil of the west. They were unwilling to depart while their father still had breath in his body but anxious about the responsibilities that would come their way when, as their mother puts it, he’s “six feet out of earshot.”
Doharty makes for a lively presence on the page, although his arrogance and conceit find him walking a fine line between likably brazen and downright obnoxious. At war with his older brother since early childhood, he seeks ways to undermine Cormac, cuckolding him without remorse and justifying his various misdeeds by admitting that “I might dream of him drowning in a slurry pit, but I do not dream of pushing him in.”
Some of the best moments in the novel come from minor characters or those just passing briefly through the pages. In a terrific confessional scene, Hughes subverts the roles of priest and penitent with a revelation that would be worthy of a novel in itself, while a brief, affecting reunion between Cormac and a barman speaks of a life lived without ambition.
The novel is occasionally marred, however, by a narrative tone so extreme in its Irishness that it begins to grate. Phrases such as “So I suggest we go and whet the backs of our throats with the black stuff, if not the brown stuff, if not the clear stuff altogether” or “I’ll just take a splash to keep myself honest, in lieu of the women!” come across as more Hollywood-Oirish than the real thing, and Doharty’s cadence can weave an unsteady path from authentic and youthful to clichéd and middle-aged.
Such complaints, however, will be less irritating to an international audience and don’t detract from Hughes’s ability to inhabit her story fully. There’s a darkness to this novel that makes it worthy of attention and the juxtaposition of isolation with eccentricity works well. If Hughes leaves the subject of the recession behind her, it will be interesting to see where her obvious gifts will take her next.
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Hit Hard by Recession, an Irish Family Faces a Bitter Struggle - The New York Times
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