All the little earls

Isn’t it funny how history repeats and repeats? Like an ouroburos eating itself over and over again, we come back upon ourselves doing the same things in different ways, different settings for the same old scenes.

This comment from a character in the new novel by Donal Ryan could be referring to the structure of the book itself, the sequel to his lauded debut, The Spinning Heart (TLS, September 27, 2013), in which the members of a naggingly vibrant chorus of citizens from a small town in County Tipperary took turns to relay not only their individual dramas, but also the broader impact of the recession overwhelming that particular corner of rural western Ireland. Ryan’s return to an identical setting and plot composition also raises the question: what is the point of a sequel, of history’s “repeats and repeats”? Money-spinner or urgent literary compulsion? This year he joins other notable Irish writers in revisiting wildly successful books, from Long Island (2024), Colm Toíbín’s follow-up to Brooklyn (2009), and Roddy Doyle’s forthcoming The Woman Behind the Door.

In 2009, the year in which The Spinning Heart is set, an Irish Times editorial asserted: “We have gone from the Celtic Tiger to an era of financial fear with the suddenness of a Titanic-style shipwreck, thrown from comfort, even luxury, into a cold sea of uncertainty”. The “financial fear” and its subsequent effects – local business closures, the credit crunch, half-built “ghost” estates littered across the landscape – dominated Ryan’s increasingly desperate narratives, with the novel culminating in a kidnap and a murder. Ten years on the same cast is suffering under a different yoke, itself a direct consequence of the crash: organized crime.

Just as in The Spinning Heart, Heart, Be at Peace employs twenty-one voices to lament – or rejoice in – the fortunes of their beleaguered town. The central culprit remains the same: “Pokey” Burke, who hightailed it to “foreign” (the locals’ term for “abroad”) at the end of the previous novel, when his dodgy building company collapsed. For every bad guy there is a good counterpart, and in this case it is Bobby Mahon, who once worked for Pokey and is now his sworn enemy. He has spent the past decade building up his own business and employing the men Pokey left in the dust, as well as befriending Denis, who was jailed for the murder of Bobby’s monstrous father, Frank. But now Pokey is back, setting up a fake employment skills college for migrants – a cover for his drug-smuggling business – and naming Josie, his eternal scapegoat of an elderly father, as its director.

A sinister black-windowed car patrols the town. Inside are Augie Penrose and three ruthless cohorts, young men in the handsome pay of a nameless overseer. Out near the lough, Vasya, a homeless immigrant from Siberia, realizes his only option is, once again, to do illegal work for Pokey. The seventeen-year-old Millicent, a doted-on daughter and granddaughter, then falls in with Augie, too innocent and too infatuated to escape his possessiveness and violence. No one heeds old Mickey Briars and his tale of the unexploded IRA incendiary his father – a captain in the volunteer army – allegedly installed in the family’s cottage a century ago. Meanwhile, Bobby becomes obsessed with enacting vengeance on the drug dealers corrupting his town. The metaphor of a ticking bomb is inescapable, overegged. Yet the most infuriating aspect of this admittedly compulsive novel is how unevenly it distributes the balance between its contrapuntal team of narrators. Some are mere ballast, wheedlingly sentimental – the fond grandmother, say, who eulogizes a teenage girl: “the shine off her like the sun on the water of the lake”. Others are bruisingly alive, such as Seanie Shaper, whose edgy, rivalrous, lifelong friendship with Bobby is threatened by his ill-judged group-sharing over WhatsApp of an incriminating photo taken at a stag do. Others are central to the story, but poorly realized: the voice of Vasya, the only non-Irish speaker, – remains romanticized and clichéd, a contrast to the infectious colloquialisms on display elsewhere.

The ambition that fuelled The Spinning Heart does, however, remain. And Donal Ryan has given life to this part of Ireland, just as Tóibín has immortalized his native Enniscorthy. He even leaves this dark tale of retribution open for a further sequel, in a cleverly cold-blooded twist. As the retired police officer Jim Gildea ruefully remarks: “This country is divided up … the very same way it used to be, into little kingdoms. Each kingdom is broken into earldoms, and all the little earls must pay their tribute in full”.

Catherine Taylor’s memoir, The Stirrings, is the winner of this year’s TLS Ackerley prize

Browse the books from this week’s edition of the TLS here

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