In the debut novel by Co Sligo author Elaine Garvey, a young woman from the west of Ireland is having a hard time in early-2000s London. Mairéad works as a dresser for a West End theatre. They’re putting on a production of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, and she has a futile crush on the actor playing Astrov.
The first time she meets the show’s ogreish producer, Oliver, he chastises her for drinking wine from a mug. Mairéad has body image issues, and skips meals to keep her weight down; she resents her imperious boss, Margaret, who is everything she isn’t: “The politeness. The thin lips. Vigilant against displays of real feelings. Her lack of self-doubt.”
The company has an exploitative working culture, and sexual harassment is an occupational hazard. Mairéad is pestered by a creepy colleague (“It was something and nothing. It was too often to take seriously. It didn’t matter to anyone else”); Oliver abuses his powerful position to have his way with various actors.
An older colleague teases her for her prissiness: “If you think you can live without getting dirty, you’re wrong.” Mairéad enjoys the work – she is obsessively passionate about clothes – but longs to “go home, to hear someone with my own accent saying things I understood”.
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This is standard first-novel fare – ingenue meets big, bad world – but The Wardrobe Department takes an absorbing turn when, about 100 pages in, Mairéad flies back to Ireland following the sudden death of her granny. The wake scene is Chekhovian in its downbeat psychodrama, as a welter of regrets and recriminations are unpacked alongside laconic chit-chat about old cars. (“Remember the Reliant?”) Her brother obnoxiously upbraids her for sitting in an unladylike way, which results in an exquisitely tense confrontation with her bullying father, Felim.
Hitherto shy and timorous, in these sections Garvey’s narrator-protagonist shows steel, standing up to Felim and refusing to feel guilty about it. (“It was his choice to get thick. His choice, not my fault.”) As her family rehash old beefs, she appraises them with the wry distance of a theatre critic: “To their credit, they played it as if they had not heard the words before: the disbelief, the hurt feelings, the amazement at each other came across as genuinely fresh.’’ Peace breaks out over a packet of custard creams.
Felim had warned Mairéad against the big city (it “doesn’t suit people like us. You’ll always be a stranger there”), and her early travails in London would seem to back him up. But she has no desire to return to the smallness of rural life, “where the options were getting married or getting married”. Mairéad’s instincts are validated when her mother reveals, in a cathartic scene, that she had been manipulated by her own mother into marrying Felim, and now plans to leave him at long last.
In some respects, the cultural landscape of the early 2000s feels very distant indeed. It was long before #MeToo, and pay phones were still a thing. To emigrate in a pre-smartphone world was a qualitatively lonelier undertaking than it would be today. Sisterly solidarity, together with the kindness shown to her in London by fellow migrants – her Muslim landlord and the company’s Romanian cleaner – will help Mairéad through the transition. She draws inspiration from Uncle Vanya, citing “Yelena’s line to Sonya: ‘You should trust people, otherwise life is impossible’”.
The London chapters, which comprise roughly half of the novel, have the thin texture and brisk, slightly rushed pacing usually associated with commercial fiction. In contrast, the section set in Ireland has depth and substance. In the former, the first-person voice is slight and unreflective; in the latter, it is self-assured and emotionally attuned. We can plausibly account for this shift in various ways – the narrator is transfigured by grief; the intensity of London life stifles her subjectivity; we are different beasts on home turf – but the abruptness still jars; at times, it feels like two distinct works, about two distinct women.
This misgiving aside, Garvey’s evocation of youthful self-discovery is well wrought and truthful. For all the glamour and intrigue of the theatre milieu, it is the poignancy of the protagonist’s homecoming that stays with the reader. Mairéad’s métier puts her at odds with her hometown: it amounts to having notions. At her grandmother’s funeral, she feels a pang of sympathy for her female forebears: “Had they once desired a feathered trilby, gold embroidery, silk next to their skin instead of worn-out cotton? ... Were they frightened of what they wanted?” The sentiment is achingly naive, and all the more real for it.
