FICTION'They fuck you up, your mum and dad/They may not mean to, but they do." Philip Larkin's well-used lines sum up the essence of this novel, Clare Morrall's third.
In it she explores the complex relationships of parents and children, examining the - usually ill - effects of upbringing and heredity on the human character. Her novel posits a connection between creative talent and mental imbalance, specifically in the form of autism - which has, as Alice, one of the characters, points out, an extremely broad spectrum. Whatever one's opinion regarding the accuracy of the hypothesis, within the parameters of this novel the case finds convincing support.
The heroine and sometime narrator is Jessica Fontaine. The child of a reasonable if distant father and a silly mother, Connie, whose main obsessions are herself and her house, the young Jessica exhibits symptoms of extreme shyness. She takes refuge in music, her own language, and practices obsessively, developing into a talented pianist. When she grows up to be a reclusive but sensible enough adult, she marries Andrew, product of another inadequate mother (his is the kind who believes in commencing education in embryo; Andrew the adult gets his own back in alarming ways for a too-early exposure to Bach). This odd couple have a son, and, not surprisingly, he, too, is a bit odd.
Like almost everyone in the novel, apart from one "normal" couple, Mary and Eamonn. Even the staff in the library where Jessica works part-time are strange: Luke, her assistant, pinches from the collections and she catches him red-handed conducting a hold-up in McDonald's, extorting a hamburger from the hamburger boy, just for the heck of it.
So, there is a certain amount of overkill. But, for all their "abnormality", most of the lives lived by the novel's characters are refreshingly ordinary. Morrall portrays the routine problems of family life with scathing accuracy. Jessica's disgruntlement with her grown-up son, who continues to live at home but wouldn't dream of doing housework, will resonate with many; so will the case of Andrew, the gifted husband who won't hold down a job. "And at that point I saw the truth. He didn't want to do anything . . . he always thought there was something enthralling around the corner but couldn't be bothered walking that far to find out." Above all, the novel impresses as one which presents a very balanced and realistic picture of mildly autistic people: the sufferers are not cute little boys who count backwards and solve bizarre mysteries thanks to their amazing powers of logic, like many of those who populate recent fiction and film. Clare Morrall, instead, portrays people who are passionate about real things: music, or games, or interior decor. And they are not sweet. Instead they range from the ordinary to the nasty, exhibiting insensitivity, impatience, in some instances violence: aspects of the syndrome which are airbrushed out of the prettier fictional depictions. Most of Morrall's autistic characters are not much different from those who are categorised as "normal": "They cope . . . you have to see it as a condition, rather than an illness. It means they live in an alternative world, a strange land that runs parallel to everyone else's." The novel is itself written in a very ordinary style indeed, unembellished by strangeness, linguistic acrobatics, or even humour. If Anne Enright's prose is haute cuisine, Morrall's is baked beans. This can become dull. Relief occurs occasionally - crème brulée for dessert - particularly in certain lovely passages describing Audlands Hall, Jessica's parental home, shambling symbol of the disintegrating family. And in terms of composition the novel is impressively layered, the past and the present interwoven with delicate skill.
Its real strength is the compassionate, intelligent portrayal of convincingly real characters affected to a greater or lesser extent by autism, but not knowing it. That unconsciousness, however, is simultaneously one of the novel's weaknesses. We can accept that neither Jessica nor her parents would have recognised that she suffered from some mild form of Asperger's syndrome as she grew up in the 1960s. But the modern reader will have diagnosed her after a few lines. And it is hard to credit that Jessica herself would fail to suspect the syndrome in her son. The main denouement fails. This may mar the pleasure for some. I found the novel enthralling, however - partly because its cast seemed so utterly familiar. One begins to wonder, however, reading this sort of novel, which stretches the boundaries of the autistic spectrum very widely, if half the world has the syndrome.
Éilís Ní Dhuibhne's latest novel is Fox, Swallow, Scarecrow. She is currently a Writer Fellow at UCD
The Language of Others By Clare Morrall Sceptre/Tindall Street Press, 376pp. £12.99