Letting it All Out: Orla Mackey's Mouthing

01:02 Paul Giles: Well, it's a series of interlinked monologues from one village in rural Ireland, the fictional Ballyrowan, and the sort of monologues extend from 1963 to 1997. Some of them are very short, just a page or two. Others are slightly longer, but it's a very colloquial idiom. People sort of as if they were chatting to you in a sort of very colloquial phrasing. And the author actually said it was based on her father's pub in County Kilkenny, where people would just come in and tell stories about themselves. As the book goes on, it's quite a you know mid length book, 240 pages. So it's not very short, but it sort of accumulates to quite a good length novel. The characters intersect with each other either through family or through some kind of community relationship, and most of them have secrets of one kind or another, either connected to traumas in their past. One father, Lennon, sort of is was responsible for his brother's death in a tractor accident some years ago, and this is something that he's always guilty about.

02:20 Another Monica went to America to have a baby, sort of before she was married. Another nun, Sister Catherine, who becomes quite a head honcho, as she's described in the Ballyrowan community, is guilty about having fancied one of her students a long time ago. So there's a lot of sort of different sides of these characters that emerge, and the title mouthing is interesting because it's sort of connected, as I said, the author to bad mouthing. That's to say, to sort of saying derogatory things about people.

02:59 Chris Murray: So it's gossip.

03:00 Paul Giles: Gossip. Well, it's not. It's partly gossip, but it's also a kind of sense of seeing people in a sort of rather bad light. And one of the interesting things about the book is that this idea of sort of conversation doesn't become simply a negative thing. Mackey said, "It's as much about wanting to be remembered, wanting to be understood or forgiven or accepted.

03:30 Reading: My father wouldn't hear of it. He said I'd more interest in listening to the Rolling Stones than did in saying my prayers. I should have left it at that. Then he brought up the time he came upon me and Tadhg Mahony below in the hurling field, not enough room to fit a postage stamp between the two of them. You weren't there to witness what I witnessed, Bridget, he said to my mother, and he spat out the words. It still made me sick to think of it. My face glued to Tadhg Mahony's, Tadhg's hand under my blouse, Daddy rounding the corner on the two of us, he hadn't looked me in the eye since. Daddy's nose was in behind the Irish Independent. He rattled it and settled himself back into his chair to let us know that the case was closed. Mammy was upset. She got the same way she always got at the mention of Tadhg and myself and the hurling pitch. I couldn't stick much more of it. I told them that I meant it. I really meant it. My father lowered the newspaper and eyed my mother as though this was a joke and she was in on it. I saw what happened in the look between the two of them. I saw them wondering if this could be the answer to their prayers, if this could solve their problem, if this could solve me.

04:44 Chris Murray: So we have a series of chapters, five chapters, I believe, and each is grouped around a trio of characters. So in each chapter, we'll have monologues from three characters, each giving his or her perspective. Perspective on a particular story, and they are always not odd couples, of course, but they are sort of odd trios, aren't they? We begin with a brother and sister, Joe and Mona Muldowney, and Father Lennon is the third voice, and he, in a way, illuminates the conflict between them and allows Mona an escape from the tyranny of her brother, although it doesn't turn out as we might expect it to.

05:30 Paul Giles: No, that's right, and I think all of these interactions between the characters are often based on misunderstandings of one kind or another. Father Lennon needs a housekeeper, and he thinks that Mona would be a good person to fill that role. She sees it, as you say, as an opportunity to escape from her claustrophobic home environment. But he's a bit uneasy about the domestic entanglement of this relationship. He doesn't want to give her the big bedroom because he thinks that that might look as though it's some kind of domestic arrangement, and he says you better go into the small room.

06:06 Chris Murray: Sense of hierarchy too.

06:07 Paul Giles: Sense of hierarchy, but also you know to remind her that she's doing a job. I mean, this is a professional thing. So there's a kind of interweaving of professional and personal across all of these connections, Mona herself is a bit put out by that. I mean, she says the window in the larger room is much nicer and much nicer view, and I couldn't have had that one. I think you see these sort of inner motives of people and how they connect in their kind of social life, and you know that leads to a much more well-rounded view of the way in which they connect. I mean, it's not obviously stream of consciousness in the modernist sense. We don't get a sense of their sort of inner thoughts, but the gossip is to some extent about themselves. I mean, these confessional monologues give us a kind of insight into their private thinking, which is often at odds with the actual social interactions that they endeavour to sort of execute.

07:13 Chris Murray: I've picked out an example there, and it's from the reflections of Father Lennon. And the surprising turn is that, on one hand, Father Lennon offers Mona an escape, and it seems frankly like a good gig for her. But as it turns out, she tyrannises him, and this is a quotation from one of Father Lennon's monologues. She saw the weakness in me, same as my own mother and father saw it. So there are patterns to the behaviours of characters in the novel, and Father Lennon, of course, here sees his unfortunate domestic arrangement with Mona as a deserved extension of his childhood, in which he's responsible, as you say, for his brother's death, and perhaps depressingly, each of Joe and Mona Muldowney becomes a tyrant in the manner of their own late father.

08:10 Paul Giles: Well, yes, I mean that's interesting, of course, because one of the themes of the book, I think, is how people sort of reflect their past. I mean, the behaviour becomes compulsive, often picking up on family traits, even Kate, who moves to America, has a kind of thrifty behaviour, which reminds Monica of the ways in which you know her mother used to sort of operate. You know, Kate's sister. So there is this kind of sense in which family traits are recapitulated throughout the book, and to some extent, you could see people as trapped within those kind of patterns. But I think that it's not all negative. One of the things that this book shows is that the family presents a kind of sense of security. You have to love your family even if you don't like them, you know. That's another line from the book. So there is this kind of sense that it becomes something you can depend upon, and I also think that that one of the one of the strengths of the book is that it doesn't sort of show behaviour as just one dimensional. I mean, I think you're right to say that you know Father Lennon feels a bit sort of trapped by how Mona behaves, but on the other hand, she does protect him. I mean, when when he has parishioners sort of calling at all hours of the day and night and saying, "Can you come and see a person who's ill and so on?

09:35 I mean, she says, "Oh no, he's got to finish his dinner, or you know that that it doesn't sound as though it's urgent. So there is a kind of sense in which that that kind of element of looking after you know somebody within her charge appeals to her sort of protectionist instinct, but also serves him to some extent as a as something which fits quite well with the dependent side of his personality.

10:02 Chris Murray: I wonder if then we could say there's a nostalgic element to the novel in what you say of how it values the family. And Kate Kelly, whom you mentioned, is an example of how a character doesn't thrive outside of the family unit. Kate Kelly has moved to New York City some decades previously, and she takes in her niece Monica Doyle, who has become pregnant. And Kate is not an exemplar of the emigrant life in America. Kate has had a very difficult life as a nurse and sort of as a chancer. Can I first ask you: Is it fair to say then there's a nostalgia for the family, or was that is that too conservative a vision of the book?

10:48 Paul Giles: Well, I mean, I can see what you mean. I mean, I think there is a kind of nostalgia there, but I think it's connected to a sort of deeper sense that life is the same everywhere. One of the things that Seán Trehy says is that life is made of the same stuff for everyone. When it all boils down to it, it's the same no matter who you are or where you're from. So there is this sense that the family, you know, the family unit, every family is the same. He says, and obviously that's not true in the sense that people live in different locations and there are different you know social arrangements and so on. But the tensions, the rivalries, you know, the affections that I think is one of the strong points of the book that it's using Ballyrowan as a kind of microcosm of the way that the world operates, and to that extent, I think that it is definitely taking issue with what was a dominant trope in the modernist novel in Irish literature, which was about you know the frontier. I mean, going to America, moving, making it, you know, sort of leaving the past behind. I mean that was something which was much more popular, I think, in the maybe late 19th century, early 20th century.

12:07 But Seán says Ballyrowan's just about as good and as bad as you'll get anywhere, and as a result, I never had much of a hankering for up in sticks and moving, you know. So, so that that's an almost deliberate withdrawal from the idea of you can change your circumstances by moving geography. So I'm not sure that it's quite nostalgic. I think it's using that kind of representation of family life in middle Ireland as a kind of microcosm of all the you know the ways in which the world operates more generally.

12:45 Chris Murray: I feel too reading this novel that distance doesn't seem to matter, as you've said, the mind is its own place. And in Kate Kelly's monologues, she has a very immediate sense of her family. It's as though she's achieved no distance from her relations with her siblings and her wish to set the record straight suggests that these are very present concerns to her. That that having having moved overseas has has made no difference.

13:14 Paul Giles: Well, I think it's made some kind of difference. I mean, she enjoys going to the bars in New York, because she doesn't meet the same people every time. That's right. She says you don't see the same old locals. So that kind of impersonality is something I think she quite likes. But at the same time, of course, she is still locked psychologically within the world of Family Island and her relationships with siblings and other relatives and so on, so you know that sense of the past and the present sort of overlapping with each other is, I think, always there. But at the same time, you know, she does achieve a certain sort of distance from the oppressive circumstances of Ireland. I mean, she says to Monica when she arrives to have her baby, "You're not going to have a priest knocking at the door. You know, I mean, there there is that kind of sense that she has, to some extent, fulfilled what she set out to do, which is to move away from the immediate circumstances, which were sort of locking her into you know certain codes of behaviour, but I think it what it does show is the limitations of that kind of transposition or that kind of movement. I mean, it's not idealised in the way that it tended to be.

14:33 You know, in the Irish American novel of the 1920s, John O'Hara or people like that. That's right. Where there was a sense that you were moving to a completely new dispensation.

14:45 Chris Murray: If I digress slightly, I wonder if this is a pattern in recent Irish fiction, and whether we could conclude that Irish fiction has become pessimistic about America. Because I'm reminded of recent conversations that you and I had about Kevin Barry's The Heart in Winter and Catherine Airey's Confessions, in which visions of America are certainly not of a land of promise or of possibility.

15:12 Paul Giles: Well, I think that's true, but I don't think that's just because of America. I mean, one of the things that has happened, obviously, in more recent times, is a much stronger sense of connection. Yes, so that you know people can phone or they can email, and you know there's a sense, as some transnational commentators have suggested, of living in two different places at the same time. So, so to that extent, what you find, I think, is a demystification of that whole idea of exile. I mean, exile was a dominant trope in the modernist period because it was seen as the offering the opportunity for a new start. I mean, Joyce drastically would, you know, once he was in Paris, would never go back to Ireland. I mean, it would be something that he would regard with a certain amount of horror, the idea of moving back from Paris to Dublin in the 1920s, but it's not true today, and that's partly because of the fact that the connections are much kind of closer and it's easier to communicate. But also, I think because the world itself has become more globalised. I mean, wherever you are, you can watch the same television programmes. You have the same cultural influences. The internet is mentioned in this book. It goes up to 1997, but there is a brief mention in with the idea of the boy in Egypt.

16:35 Yes, that you know the internet plays a part in that romance. So I think that's one of the gradual processes as time goes on, sort of suggesting ways in which Ireland has become part of the world community and not just something a base from which people sort of seek to extract themselves from.

16:57 Chris Murray: I wonder if I could pick up one of the threads of something you said earlier then, and return to the idea of mouthing, and you said that it's more nuanced than gossip, and I wonder if we could pin down what these monologues are doing. And Kate Kelly is an interesting way into this because often in her case, we find her reflecting on what she says. That it's clear that she intends an apology in the sense of a defence of herself. She also catches herself in unexpected moments of truth telling, and at other times signals that she is deceiving her addressee Monica. Though there are layers here because she is telling us about telling Monica, and she may tell us things that Monica doesn't hear, and vice versa. Can we talk about what is achieved in these monologues? Do these characters come to know themselves in the act of telling us about their lives?

18:06 Paul Giles: I doubt that, to be honest. I mean, I think what it suggests is how there are so many different ways of understanding the same issue, and that people can deceive themselves as well as deceive others. And more than that, there is a kind of sense that discovering the empirical truth of any given event is very difficult. I mean, one of the issues is whether or not Kate, as a nurse in America, was responsible for her husband Desmond's death when he got ill, and whether or not she gave him a push into the next world. But that's never resolved. You know, it's just left at the level of gossip, something which is said by other people. And even when she is talking to herself about it, she doesn't spell anything out. She doesn't confess anything. It's left as a sort of vague idea. And I think that's actually quite a clever literary device in the book because it shows how mixed up people's motives are. I mean, there are lots and lots of shades of grey in the book. There isn't black and white. You know, all motives tend to be mixed, and you know, from that point of view, I think you could actually see it as a very Catholic kind of book in the sense that you know a lot of these sins are venial sins, you know that they're they're almost human failings which people are confessing to because they are human, and there isn't some kind of sense of you know evil which is going to result in a kind of apocalyptic judgement.

19:41 Chris Murray: No, no.

19:43 Paul Giles: So from that point of view, I think it reinforces the humanity of these people, but also the messiness of their lives.

19:50 Chris Murray: That's right. I notice that frequently characters are weighed down by the shame of secrets, which they divulge, and no one else cares about them. Is this use of multiple perspectives around storylines? Then is it a way to probe at values? Is that something Mackey's interested in?

20:11 Paul Giles: Oh yes, I definitely think so. I think this is one of the reasons that the novel is interesting because it is a very sort of localised depiction of you know County Kilkenny in Ireland, but it's also to some extent a very almost philosophical view of humanity, where the whole idea of good against evil is counterpointed against a sense of shared humanity, where people are all in the same boat. You know, they're all sort of immersed in the world of sin and mistakes and you know misunderstandings and everything like that. And that I think is very much part of an Irish literary tradition. I mean, Joyce, of course, does it all the time. I mean, and it's connected to Irish Catholic theology as well, where there isn't that kind of Manichaean division between good and evil. There is this kind of sense of a sort of purgatorial middle space, you know, all the way. So I think it is quite a learned novel, even though the narrators in the book are all speaking in the most colloquial, you know, down-to-earth kind of idiom, but the overall sense I think that you get of it is quite a philosophical sense of the way in which this community works and the kind of values that it shares.

21:36 Chris Murray: Is that borne out then by the plots in the sense that we have many stories in this novel, but we don't have a story. We don't have an overall arc or trajectory, and I wonder if that is deliberately to bear out your point in that Mackey is resisting an overall struggle.

22:00 Paul Giles: Yeah, I think that's true. I mean, the novel is really about accumulation. I mean, accumulation over time, adding voices. The last section, the James Hickey section, is interesting because he's the only one who really doesn't tell us his own story. I mean, he's telling you know his his from his perspective of someone who's always lived in the village, and he talks about you know different characters and you know how they you know sort of came to be significant within you know that location, but he's not really an overarching narrator. I mean, he's not somebody who's summing things up. What he's doing is just talking about various characters, you know, who he's come across. So there is a kind of sense of contingency, a sense of the kind of haphazard, even in that final chapter where you might expect, you know, everything to be integrated and summed up, and it's not. I mean, there is a kind of sense of leaving loose threads, and you know the of time just sort of passing on the multi generational aspect of it is I think one of the things that is most apparent in the book. That's to say, you know, moving from the 1960s to the 1990s and seeing how people evolve and seeing how memories change, you know, and the perspectives about what happened in the past change as people grow older.

23:27 Chris Murray: And this works for you, which is to say that it coheres as a novel overall. You don't find yourself wanting for a kind of unifying. I think you're right. I think it would be clumsy if the Hickey monologue at the end tied everything up and gave us a sort of final update in every character.

23:45 Paul Giles: Yeah, I don't think it's meant to be that kind of novel. I think you could argue that it does become a little bit-I don't know what the word is. I mean, a little bit contingent. I mean, there is a kind of sense that some of the sections might have been left out, and the overall structure of the book wouldn't have been changed very much. So, from that point of view, I could see some people might have got impatient with it. But I actually found the best bits quite interesting, and having sort of reread it, I found I got more out of it the second time because you picked up more of the details, which were not necessarily, you know, so obvious on the first reading. I mean, just in the way that people thought, the overtones, perhaps the buried meanings of what they were saying, so that the secrets are not only secrets they hold in their own minds, but also there's a sort of slightly subterranean element in the text. I mean, there's kind of hints, for instance, when Kate is talking about her cancer, you know, as a guest. Yes, which is, and it's it's easy to miss that, but it's obviously something which is preying on her mind, and it becomes more evident when you read it the second time and see how things ended up for her. So there are foreshadowings of later events, and in that sense, I think that the novel is quite sophisticated in the way that it moves between past and present.

25:12 You know, it sort of prefigures things which happen later, and to that extent, it's only when you're rereading it that you get the full dimensions of that.

25:23 Chris Murray: And in fact, within individual chapters, each chapter telling us about a particular set of characters, the monologues can skip back and forth through time as well, and we're left to assemble a truth such as we can.

25:41 Paul Giles: Yeah, or not, as the case may be. I mean, I think that it doesn't sort of lead us in the direction of a kind of detective novel where we're seeking to find out, you know, what the truth is. I mean, it's one. It's like you know how gossip works in the Victorian novel. I mean, it's it becomes its own sort of self generating mechanism. You know, the circulation of public feeling. Although, of course, it's in a much more localised kind of community. I think the other thing, which is worth emphasising, is how you know funny a lot of these contradictions are. I mean, the way in which people look at things in different ways. For instance, you know, Pat after Seán has died. Pat Lacey is you know somebody who seems to be interested in Ann, and she's sort of trying to sort of say, "Can you come to church and you know see my son and so on? So there's a kind of she's reaching out.

26:44 Chris Murray: She's sabotaging the kitchen sink repeatedly so that he'll come over and repair it from that. That's right.

26:50 Paul Giles: That's right. Yes, she's trying to sort of destroy it, and then she thinks he's not interested. But actually, he is interested. He says, but you know, he's sort of almost guilty because he thinks that it's wrong for him to be sort of having these kind of feelings. So that's a kind of way in which, obviously, you know, missed connections. But it's an example of how when you see how different people are understanding the same you know dilemma, you get a very different kind of sense of it. So it's not that one perspective is true or false. It's just that you see how you know they never come to an understanding in the the appropriate way.

27:33 Chris Murray: Pat is afraid that he doesn't know how to love, but he tells us that he's happier with the public misconception that no woman who has come along is good enough for him.

27:46 Paul Giles: Well, yeah, I mean, yes, and again, you can't entirely trust, you know, what he's saying to himself. So, I think the humour in the book is definitely something which is is actually quite strong. I mean, there's a bit of a gothic humour in it, a kind of a constant sense of death and you know the death rattle going on. But at the same time, that mixture between the trivial and the immense, which Carson McCullers actually said was one of the characteristics of the Southern Gothic novel in America, Flannery O'Connor and people like that, where you're sort of mixing up death and you know more superficial things. I think that comes through here as well. That's to say that that there's this kind of element of different dimensions, incongruities, and you know the the play with scale is also interesting, you know, where small things become big things and vice versa. I mean, that I think is one of the points about Kate's, you know, perspective from America, because we're asked to see things from a different point of view, so that it isn't simply a claustrophobic, isolated novel. But at the same time, we're constantly being told that these small events in Ballyrowan are, you know, mean the world to people.

29:10 Chris Murray: That's right. And in Kate's case, she hasn't achieved any perspective from America. That that that pettiness seems to travel across time and space in this novel.

29:21 Paul Giles: Well, it does, but at the same time, there is a kind of sense I think in which she is seeing things from an alternative, you know, geographical perspective, and you know, I think her monologues are different from what they would have been if she had been based in Ballyrowan. I mean, she's got a kind of American impatience, if you like.

29:43 Chris Murray: She's impatient, perhaps. I mean, I might even venture the word vicious at times.

29:48 Paul Giles: Yeah, I think that's true and spiteful as well. But you know that is also, I mean, part of life. I mean, you know, that kind of anger and that kind of. Vindictiveness and that kind of sense that you've been betrayed. I mean, that's a part of what she kind of feels from that perspective. But when when people are in Ballyrowan, there is the kind of sense in which you know that, as somebody says, as small as these things sound, they were big when they happened. Yes. So you know that magnification of small events, and I think what Kate does is to put that into perspective somehow. I mean, so that we can see that there again, there's different ways of thinking about this, and that not everything is necessarily localised. Although the novel quite cleverly shows that these very local events assume massive proportions in people's minds.

30:46 Chris Murray: Yes, one example, of course, is how Kate reflects on Monica's pregnancy, and which is to say, she considers it absurd that the young woman feels she has to flee the country, and she says, "This is 1973, for heaven's sake.

31:03 Paul Giles: Well, yes, but you know, as we know full well, I mean that that you know, social changes, as reflected in the official histories of the period, didn't necessarily reflect what people were thinking in Ballyrowan or other places. Certainly not 73.

31:21 Chris Murray: Not a cosmopolitan Ireland. The year Ireland joined the European Economic Community, of course.

31:27 Paul Giles: But you know that's I think you know one of the one of the things actually that novels can do, which social histories can't. I mean, social histories tend to say, "Oh well, you know, Ireland joined the E. C. in 1973, and you know that wasn't that sort of modernising thing, but it you don't sort of get from that the sense that how people in County Kilkenny in 1973 were thinking about that issue, and one of the things that Kate says is not just about the you know the pregnancy, but about the social expectations for girls in Ireland at that time, that they were all meant to be either nurses or teachers. You know that was just the expectation. So there's a kind of time lag again in terms of how community expectations work, and I think that's one of the things that you know she gets frustrated by. I mean she she sees that you know in America things are on the whole you know more progressive, and that she feels that Monica's just got got sort of stuck within this kind of world, which is in a kind of time warp, really.

32:36 Chris Murray: As you said, it is a novel fixated with death. Of the five chapters, four of them have titles which allude to death. The first is Remains, then Last Offices, Busy with the Dying, and even Part Four is entitled Walking Corpse. Although really, it centres on a primary school girl, Joanne Henderson.

32:59 Paul Giles: Yes. Well, yes, this is true. Of course, I mean it fits with the idea of the multi generational thing. I mean, people living and dying and so on, but it does add to this kind of dark humour of the book. I mean, one of the most striking things I think about it is Seán's monologues after he's died.

33:20 Chris Murray: Yes, Seán is dead, and it's wisdom from beyond the grave.

33:22 Paul Giles: They're actually quite funny, you know, because he's looking at you know the way life is unfolding in Ballyrowan, and even the way that he dies. I mean, Ann's his wife is always fed up with him whistling as he goes to work.

33:40 Chris Murray: Enrages her.

33:41 Paul Giles: And her last words to her husband are, "Would you fuck up with that whistling? And then she says, "I never heard him whistle again because he keeled over with a heart attack.

33:52 Chris Murray: Too many breakfast rolls for that man. Yeah.

33:55 Paul Giles: So there's there's a kind of sort of macabre humour, but again, it's linked to the limitations of the human body and the way in which people get incarcerated, you know, not only in their own mental conditions but in their kind of physical frames. I mean, the sort of Joanne's mother who is you know stuck in bed and sort of eating peanut butter and watching carry on films. I mean, is I think actually the most ghoulish character in the book. We don't hear from her, interestingly.

34:30 Chris Murray: No, I waited for the moment. So in this fourth chapter, Louise is the English mother of Joanne Henderson, who splits from her husband over Paula Cahill, and Paula, I believe, is the person referred to in the chapter title "Walking Corpse, because when Paula has an affair with Louise's husband, her friends remark that it's not making her happy.

34:59 Paul Giles: Yeah, I mean, I think. You could say walking corpse, you know, could apply to Louise as well. I mean, in a sense, because she is sort of somehow immobilised by sitting corpse. Sitting corpse, yeah.

35:11 Chris Murray: We don't get her voice, though. It's an interesting point.

35:14 Paul Giles: We don't get Oliver's voice neither.

35:16 Chris Murray: We don't get Oliver's the husband. That's the name.

35:17 Paul Giles: That again is interesting in terms of the book structure, and what it suggests is how this event unfolds again at the level of gossip. I mean, Oliver and Louise are only refracted, yes, you know, through what other people say or, you know, the mouth about them.

35:36 Chris Murray: Particularly their daughter.

35:38 Paul Giles: Yes, sort of Joanne, and I mean the Julia Devlin who sort of takes in Joanne is bad mouthed by Joanne's grandmother.

35:51 Chris Murray: Yes, that's right. On the street, she the granny accosts Joanne. Do you remember what she says?

35:57 Paul Giles: I can't. I can't remember exact the exact words, but it's not very nice. I remember that she...

36:02 Chris Murray: Accosts her in the street, and I suppose the word about Ballyrowan is that Joanne has gone begging to the neighbour Julia, whereas really the story in this section of the book reminded me of Claire Keegan's Foster, in that Julia and Bill don't have a child, and a child is seemingly unwanted by Louise and Oliver, and a child is wanted by Julia and Bill, and they take Joanne in. And this is quite a sentimental part of the book. And then it's we're sort of taken down by Joanne's granny, who says that she is seen as a beggar for going into the neighbour to look after.

36:41 Paul Giles: Yeah. Well, I mean, that's it's interesting because it shows the discrepancy between what we're told from Joanne's narrative and what the gossip in the community is. Yes. So again, you get the sense of how the public voice, if you like, is very different from the internal monologues. So again, multiple perspectives. There is this kind of sense that that Julia is not exactly acting totally selflessly. I think. I mean that that you know she's somebody who likes being a kind of parent. That's right for Joanne because her relationship with her own husband is not particularly interesting, and her own children have left home and so on. So again, mixed motives of various kinds. But it is interesting the way that the English mother, Joanne's English mother, is stereotyped. I mean, she seems to be the only character in the book who is totally stereotyped, and you know, just watching these awful English, you know, films, the Carry On films.

37:51 Chris Murray: She sits on a Union Jack cushion, and at the climax of that story, she sets a light of bonfire in which she throws her husband Oliver's Catholic paraphernalia, such as his Sacred Heart of Jesus, yeah, yeah, and she's constantly complaining about the. Gosh, I wish I could remember what she says. She's ferociously critical of Catholicism and said, you know, praying the Rosary on one hand and philandering on the other.

38:21 Paul Giles: Yeah, well, that that perhaps is the most explicit sort of political moment in the book, you know, because it's it's some kind of clash between not only these individual characters but also between England and Ireland. Yes, you know, in terms of their religious approaches and their you know their attitudes to life more generally. So I think that's interesting from that point of view, but I didn't feel that that Louise was you know fully embodied. I mean, if if there was perhaps you know a flaw in the book as I saw it, it was that that side of you know her own experience was something that was marginalised or indeed neglected in the book.

39:04 Chris Murray: I could agree with that suggestion that that character is stereotyped, and we needed some development of why Louise is so utterly separate, that she hasn't integrated at all, that she lives in isolation, constantly in consumption in various ways of Englishness, which ranges from fries, peppermint creams to, as you've said, carry-on movies to documentaries about Princess Diana. And this is something of a trope in Irish culture of the English person who doesn't engage with Irish culture. But like you, I wish Mackey would do something a bit more with it, although I did like the final turn in that storyline, in which the neighbour Julia realises that Louise does not seek simply revenge on her husband Oliver, but is now meaningfully going to repair relations with her daughter Joanne.

39:56 Paul Giles: Yeah, yeah. Well, I think the Joanne. Herself is an interesting character, and you know the sort of triangular nature of that is I think quite well done. And Paula herself is also quite an interesting character.

40:10 Chris Murray: Paula is Oliver's young lover, as it were. Paula pursues this relationship with Oliver and becomes fixated with him, despite the observation. of her friends, that certainly he does not make her any happier, and he is not a barrel of laughs to be around. So that's quite a sad storyline with Paula, who really gains nothing from this affair.

40:35 Paul Giles: That's right. I mean, and she moves out of the flat that she's sharing with you know two of her girlfriends, and then sort of moves into this kind of bedsit, which Oliver visits occasionally, and the bathroom is just you know very shabby and so on. So it is a sad story, but it's a it's a story about disillusionment and a kind of again a demystification of romance. Yes, I mean, you don't find here the sort of the romantic happy ending. So again, it's not a sort of you know a crowning glory. It's something which is connected to daily life and daily routines, and you know the mixed affairs or the mixed sort of life and the quality of life that they kind of share within marriage. So again, I think it fits with the tone of the book, which is very much about how daily life is, you know, not something which is built up of you know kind of fancy stories or fairy stories. Yes, it's something which is much more mundane.

41:42 Chris Murray: The book does tend to conclude sections or subsections with sort of epigrammatic life philosophies or little statements that kind of encapsulate perspectives on life. One of those is when Monica visits her therapist, and Monica remarks on disappointment, and the therapist says something to the effect: "You find everything disappointing. There are these moments in which the lines of story and speech wrap up with commentaries on on life, and that there is a kind of philosophical perspective being presented by the book-is it one you feel then in which we come to terms with mundanity, with mediocrity?

42:32 Paul Giles: Well, I think it's a book which is seeing everyday life as almost kind of inherently, if one's going to be academic about it for a moment, ontologically mixed. That's to say that everything has good and bad aspects to it. Monica says at one point, "We can all only love in our own way, you know, and that is a. I mean, it's not the romantic, you know, version of marriage, but it's a kind of practical version of marriage. I mean, the idea that that people get along and that they come to terms with the pressures on their sort of daily life, and I think that's one of the things that this book does in often quite a sardonic and humorous way. I mean, to say that even the things which look really bad aren't necessarily so bad, and the things which might seem idyllic and beautiful aren't necessarily so charismatic as all that. I mean that there is this middle ground which the novel negotiates. I think, and I think that the fact that you rightly point out, you know, the fact that there are these philosophical moments, often at the conclusion of each chapter is not incidental because it is trying to make a point about you know the condition of life.

43:49 I mean, it's not just a biography of different characters who happen to get into her kind of purview, and based upon obviously Mackey's own experiences growing up in County Kilkenny, and you know, listening to these stories in her father's pub. I mean, this is you know the experiences that she imbibed, you know, as a child and so on. So I think from that point of view, it is a quite a striking and quite a sophisticated way of thinking about life, and the fact that it is in such a sort of down home colloquial idiom. I think shouldn't blind us to the fact that that it's just a kind of a narrative about local people.

44:31 Chris Murray: No.

44:31 Paul Giles: You know, there's clearly a kind of philosophical structure which is running through it.

44:37 Chris Murray: As to what we extract from that, in the end, we've talked about how some of the voices are at times cruel, and that marathon can be mean-spirited gossip. But is the way that these voices balance out then with this overall sense that we reconcile ourselves to vicissitude, as it were, is it an uplifting one? Is that what we take from the book in the end?

45:00 Paul Giles: Well, I'm not sure. Uplifting. I mean, uplifting sounds, you know, like one of those, you know, sort of self-help book. I don't mean it to sound like self-help books.

45:10 Chris Murray: Thank you very much.

45:12 Paul Giles: I think that what is, I wouldn't call it uplifting, but what is somehow reassuring about this book is the way in which the connections are made, the way in which people are sort of brought together, either in within a community or even through gossip. I mean, even through the way in which they kind of talk about each other and interconnect with each other. One of the things that's said about Pat Lacey by Jim Hickey at the end is that he's too isolated. He says this is the worst the thing that could happen. It's the killer. There's more damage to isolation than than the worst woman could cause you. So that sense of being isolated is, I think, what we don't on the whole get in this book, so that even the bad mouthing, even the gossip, is something which is to some extent part of a kind of human chorus. I mean, a sense of interconnection. One of the you know one of the most striking things I think at the end of the book, is when Jim is talking about his mother's death and so on. She dies, and then the cat, which you know was her constant companion during her last days, sort of lies on the mother's corpse and won't won't get off.

46:36 But then, when the cat is offered a piece of ham springs off. Def springs off, having given the corpse a final lick, as if to say good luck, you know. And there is that kind of sense of fatalism, I think, and acceptance really of the vicissitudes of life, so that there isn't that kind of sense of dreaming.

47:02 Chris Murray: No, and that's striking. And in light of what we said earlier, when I mentioned Ireland entering the European Economic Community in 1973, which is one of the dates, there are many dates to which monologues in this novel are fixed, and 1973 is one of them. And you responded very rightly, I think, by saying that you didn't say, but I think it was hinted at that that sort of economic dawn doesn't seem to touch the people of Ballyrone at all, and whatever optimism characters seem to possess in this novel is very limited. They are not fantasists, or their fantasists are very small ones that Ann Trehy imagines she might have a romance with Pat Lacey, and Paula Cahill imagines she might be able to prize Oliver Henderson away from his unhappy marriage. But there's no large-scale fantasy about life among these characters. And she says about

48:00 Paul Giles: Paula says about Oliver that it's like watching somebody on top of the pops. I mean, you don't think that is ever, you know. I mean, you might fancy them, but you don't think it's nothing is ever going to happen there. So I think there is this sense of you know just accepting the kind of lot you know that that life has has dealt to them. I think you could accuse this of being pessimistic because of the kind of sense of fatalism. I mean, the idea that people are sort of trapped within a world and don't want to do anything about it, and that's one of the things I think that exasperates Kate. Yes, you know, in America, that she feels these people are just too accepting. I mean, that that is I think where the novel situates itself, and its its line is that the kind of tensions and the kind of positive things that happen within this kind of community are the same that happen in communities the world over. I mean, that's what it that's the pitch that it takes.

48:57 Chris Murray: It's a very globalised vision, despite what we've said about the great amount of Irish idiom and Catholicism.

49:04 Paul Giles: Well, and it's also a universalist idiom, and then it's the Catholic Church as a kind of universal church. That's what I mean. You know that that whole idea that there is this kind of symbiotic interaction between the local and the global. I mean, it is, I think, a book which is very ritualistic in its emphasis. I mean, there's a lot on Catholic rosaries and that kind of thing, and the repetitive nature of that ritual is followed. I think in the family patterns that you kind kind of see developing within the book, you know the way in which certain patterns of life in families repeat themselves.

49:47 Chris Murray: The rosary specifically is emblematic of a kind of liberation of the Muldowney family when the father dies at the very beginning of the novel, and the mother decides that they will cease to. Kneel to say the rosary, and this begins a sort of wave of liberality that sweeps over the house with the dog coming inside and the girls being allowed to purchase lipstick and this kind of thing.

50:13 Paul Giles: I mean, another scene which is which has often been commented on in reviews is when Joe sort of takes the cow in. Oh yes, you know because he's isolated after sort of Mona sort of moves out, and this is seen by the village as very emblematic of his declining mental health.

50:35 Chris Murray: It brings him visitors, and that's that's quite sad. That's touching. That's one of the benefits, which on which Joe remarks, is that people come to see him because he's got a cow in the house to see whether he's really as far gone.

50:50 Paul Giles: Yeah, and then when they sort of take him off to the mental home, and you know he says, "Oh well, it wasn't too bad, you know that one place is the same as another, you know, and so on. So again, there's that sense of calamity being avoided, and connections being made between different kinds of things. I mean, the relationship between you know cow between the cow and Joe is a bit like the relationship between the cat and Jim's mother at the end, you know there is that connection between human and animals, which is quite powerful at times.

51:27 Chris Murray: Monica very powerfully denies it when she's leaving New York, and as she walks out the door of her late aunt's apartment, she hears the dog scratching, and she realises that she hasn't made any arrangement for the dogs. She is on her way to the airport back to Ireland, and what will she do?

51:45 Paul Giles: Yeah, and we never hear anything more about the dogs. It's interesting that the fate of animals is something which you know the book keeps coming back to.

51:55 Chris Murray: They're helpless. Animals are always helpless in this novel.

51:58 Paul Giles: But a lot of the people are helpless as well. That's right. You know, so there is that connection between them at some unconscious level. I actually thought one of the more interesting narratives also was this Sister Catherine, you know, who facilitates the pregnancy for you know the helping Monica out with the pregnancy, but then is guilty about the feeling that she's thinking about her as a student. I thought about her often and knew it was wrong, you know. So there is that quite clear sense that she knows that she's doing a bad thing by you know having feelings, romantic feelings for her student, and she's depressed when Monica meets Matty. You know who she eventually married. Envious, you're...

52:48 Chris Murray: Jealous.

52:49 Paul Giles: Yeah, I'm going to be hearing a lot more of him. But then, of course, by the end of the book, she's become absolutely the pillar of the community.

52:56 Chris Murray: She has. I think Catherine is a fascinating character, and early in this episode, we've heard Hazel reading an excerpt from one of Catherine's monologues, in which Catherine alludes to the fact that she's going to become a nun, seemingly to escape difficulty with her parents. On the one hand, we see that she is a lesbian nun. On the other hand, she is truly, as it were, wedded to the faith. I'm going to read a few lines from one of Catherine's monologues here. Community life brings its own sacrifices, although in many ways there are the same expectations here in the convent as there were at home with my parents. I have to appear good enough, devoted enough, serious enough. The difference is that here I don't have any distractions. There's only one person to worship, and no one judges you for loving him. Just the opposite. Things are a lot more straightforward, and I understand the rules. I think in recent years we might be reaching a sort of post-outrage attitude to Catholicism in Irish fiction, in which authors are returning to consider the nature of spiritual life in ways that perhaps weren't fashionable a decade ago.

54:13 So Catherine is a complex character in one sense because of this true devotion which conflicts with her sexuality, but it's also another instance of something you alluded to in this novel, in the ways that people form surrogate families, and she alludes to that life. She tells us plainly that the convent is, among other things, a domestic space which replaces her family, and it's another of those instances in which we form the connections we can.

54:43 Paul Giles: And it's again it's a repetition. I mean, it's the the pattern of the family repeating itself in the convent with the same kind of proscriptions. I mean, the same sense of you know setting up rules which are not which are not meant to be broken, and one. Of the things I find sort of interesting about it is not perhaps well the spiritual side of it, but also the sexual side of it. Yes, because again, it's seen as to some extent a kind of natural thing, you know, within Catherine's world, and not something I mean, which she I mean she kisses Monica, but there is not any great outrage. There's no great, you know, sort of court case or anything like that. And again, it's part of the sort of mixed nature of the human psychology, and it doesn't necessarily negatively impact on you know the great asset that she becomes to Ballyrowan later in her life.

55:37 Chris Murray: Mackey doesn't labour this point. She doesn't dwell on on whether Catherine is ashamed for sexuality, she just places it there in this is complex novel for us.

55:46 Paul Giles: So I think post spiritual outrage, but also perhaps post sexual outrage.

55:50 Chris Murray: Yes, that's right.

55:51 Paul Giles: You know, I mean, of which we've had a lot, of course, recently with all of the inquiries and so on. So, so again, it seems to be a very kind of humanist book in the sense that it's thinking about the complexities of human nature and the way in which you know different aspects of that sort of factor into you know what a person is whether they're in the religious life or not.

56:16 Chris Murray: Thank you, Paul. Okay.

56:30 Narrator: Irish Books is hosted by Christopher Murray and produced by Martin Franklin for East Coast Studio, with support from the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the Embassy of Ireland, Australia, and Monash University.