The Ghostlights by Gráinne Murphy: A rural Irish family on the edge

The Ghostlights

Author: Gráinne Murphy

ISBN-13: 9781800319417

Publisher: Legend Press

Guideline Price: £8.99

Earlier this year, when Gráinne Murphy’s short story Further West was longlisted for the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award, she wrote: “I am endlessly interested in family … and in identity, those moments where we have to stare life down and choose who it is we want to be.” As a manifesto, it applies perfectly to her second novel, a story of a family at a moment of reckoning.

The Ghostlights is a three-hander, with the perspectives of mother Ethel and twin sisters Liv and Marianne guiding us along. Marianne has returned to her hometown after a dispute with her other half. Liv has been holding down the fort since their father’s death: managing the family B&B, looking after her teenage son and trying to keep Ethel’s alcohol-based coping methods under control.

As family tension rises, a body is found in the local lake. The death, of a former B&B guest, shakes our central characters to their core.

The blessed and the damned is a theme that runs throughout. The family B&B sits between two landmarks: a statue of the Virgin Mary, which people have witnessed moving over the years, and a “drying-out centre” for recovering alcoholics.

The action takes place on Easter week. A man dies on Good Friday and his body is discovered on Easter Saturday, a day the Apostles’ Creed associates with Jesus’s descent into hell. Can we read anything into this? The question of how this man died, and whether he took his own life, is central. Has he sinned? Do humans have autonomy over their lives, and deaths? How do we approach such a thing in a unit such as a family?

At times the book’s efforts to lean into its central themes feel stilted, such as Liv’s revelatory writings on her shower door and Ethel’s fortuitous crossword clues. Its treatment of religion, however, and its changing cultural, spiritual and moral significance in rural Ireland is deftly managed. Blessing yourself, Marianne observes pithily, “was like a yawn. A person couldn’t help themselves. Once Catholicism was in your blood, there was no escaping it. Like malaria.”

In its close, contained setting, The Ghostlights sometimes feels closer to short story than novel. But it has enough depth to make for a satisfying read, and Murphy’s understated writing style keeps the pages turning.