Fallen by Mel O’Doherty: Intergenerational tale of institutional abuse

Fallen

Author: Mel O’Doherty

ISBN-13: 978-1910422779

Publisher: Bluemoose Books

Guideline Price: £9.99

Fallen is about the lifelong and intergenerational effects of the abuse and neglect of women and babies at Bessborough House. We meet Michael Connolly as a teenager, messing about and drinking with his friend John in the ruins of the local big house. John talks about his expulsion from private school, the result of bullying for “illegitimacy”, and his pride in his mother, who at the age of 17 avoided the mother and baby home by threatening to kill herself if her parents didn’t allow her to stay with them and keep her child.

Michael’s story, ostensibly more respectable, unravels slowly and painfully in a tangle of words unsaid, truths rejected and the lives of women and infants held worthless by religious and medical authorities.

The novel is centrally the story of Michael’s mother, married to his father and eccentric but apparently content enough, until one day, on a caravan holiday in Ventry, she takes to her bed in the afternoon. The family abandon the holiday after five days, and once home Elaine goes to bed and stays there.

Weeks pass; the doctor, an ambivalent character who half-recognises buried trauma, diagnoses depression and urges Elaine to talk about her past and for Michael’s father, Martin, to listen. Elaine does talk, can’t stop talking, about nuns watching over rows of infants starving to death and beating and torturing the mothers who want to feed them.

She displays her own breast, burned with a poker to punish her for trying to breastfeed her first, lost baby. She begins to picket Mass with home-made signs denouncing the church and proclaiming the existence of mass graves on convent grounds, and she writes repeatedly to newspapers to tell her story. Elaine ends up, of course, institutionalised again, drugged and dismissed as crazy by her community, her doctors and her own husband and son.

The novel’s structure is not linear, and we learn early that Elaine kills herself when Michael is only 12, meaning that by the time her stories are acknowledged as truth, Martin and Michael have lived with their own versions of the past for many years. Michael has taken a history degree and become a teacher but remains socially arrested in adolescence, unsuccessful with women, bantering incessantly with John alone and still living with his father in the house where his mother lived and died.

Fallen has a complicated timeline that is rarely confusing but requires the reader to hold multiple positions at once (a reference, perhaps, to the untimely persistence of trauma). Michael, John and Martin are strong characters with distinctive voices, but also a penchant for explaining generational changes in Irish masculinity to each other. Elaine is a convincing and memorable portrait of a woman destroyed, though we have little sense of who she could have been.

O’Doherty develops the Cork setting intricately, showing how the characters’ world encompasses them while also offering enough guidance for the unknowing reader.

The novel’s flaw is its dependence on the repeated comparison of Irish Catholicism’s treatment of women to the Holocaust. John “loved teaching the Holocaust. He loved that the kids loved it.” John’s pleasure is in truth told, evil exposed to daylight, rather than suffering or violence, but even so there is disturbing instrumentalism here.

He and Jill take a group of fifth years to Auschwitz, where he stands by the gas chambers and is reminded of his mother’s story of a baby pulled from its mother’s arms by nuns. Later Elaine remembers the look on the face of the doctor who diagnosed her pregnancy after rape at the age of 13: “It reminded her of faces in the Warsaw Ghetto; she’d seen pictures on the footpath in town … the confusion and horror in his eyes.”

Towards the end Michael catches from a homeless man the whiskey-and-cigarettes smell of his mother and thinks that “every Holocaust survivor he ever watched” spoke of memory and smell. He accuses his father of being “a local in sleepy Belsen village. You look away.”

Fallen stands or fails on how you feel about this. Many readers, while acknowledging the full horror of institutional abuse and the collaboration of laypeople in Ireland, will find the comparison dismaying.

Sarah Moss’s latest novel is Summerwater