Nuala O'Faolain's memoir, Are you Some- body?, dominated best-seller lists for months during the mid-1990s, when outpourings of grief and damage to ordinary people characterised Ireland's public life. It is astonishing to remember the reception O'Faolain's book evoked, and to recall how completely her writing disclosed the rawest passions and aspirations of her life. The scale of her success reveals both the degree to which O'Faolain accessed a deeply felt experience recognisable to many, and also the extent to which she had established an audience for her writing through journalism. It is remarkable that a writer who chose to expose herself so frankly would brave a debut novel that surely risks comparison.
My Dream of You imagines the self-awakening of Kathleen, a travel writer and pioneer of contemporary career women. In the midst of unceasing wanderings she drinks, parties and has frequent lovers. She thinks of herself as a woman "saved by England from Ireland", who escaped her mother's lot of dependence and children for England's post-pill sexual gratification.
What at first sight appears pleasure-seeking is revealed as pain avoidance when Jimmy, Kathleen's gay colleague and best friend, dies suddenly, pitching her into "nothing". Aside from her "family" at the office, Kathleen's only long-term fascination has been with a scantily-reported 1850 affair between a landlord's wife and their stablehand. So just months from her 50th birthday, and 30 years out of Ireland, Kathleen quits work and sets out to investigate the lovers' "whispering ghosts".
O'Faolain's plot is more gradual and subtle than this outline suggests, and the dream unfolds in two narratives, about on the one hand Kathleen's search of hopes and phantasms, and on the other, her imagined stories of the lovers, Marianne Talbot and William Mullan. This is fiction which is not entirely seductive or easy, but accessible and enjoyable for its own sake. The Talbot affair is written in a style that indulges the straightforward identification and intense longing of popular fiction. Kathleen's own story is starker. She is a remote character, sheltering in the psychic equivalent of her basement flat: a dead space, a part of her aliveness which she has literally, buried. Only towards the end of this novel does the reader understand the dead part of her life.
It is as if Jimmy and his relationship with his parents are Kathleen's anchor to "normal" families. The void he leaves reawakens Kathleen's dead familial past. Why, the reader may ask, does analysing her flight to England compel Kathleen to revisit the Famine? Her experience of English attitudes to Ireland is dominated by old-style politics and dynamics of sexual availability. In this context the Famine could become an over-invested representation of persecuted Irishness and a defensive recuperation of the past. But O'Faolain makes a serious attempt to locate Irish scars outside the oedipal trauma of England-Ireland, and is well aware of the cultural politics within which her fiction is embedded.
Kathleen identifies profoundly with characters who have impoverished maternal relationships, and invents Marianne Talbot as mother orphaned. By contrast she imagines for Mullan much more of a relationship with his mother, whom he remembers as socially powerful and still alive within him. The Talbot story attempts to render visible Kathleen's inability to feel alive: it invokes the Famine as a maternal crisis of nurture and protection, the point at which the potent mother disappears. There is little here grieving the event as a catastrophic encounter with death; as a historical moment it represents for Kathleen a negative of memory and thought, linked to her own traumatic past.
Although her father is made both patriarchal and ridiculous, it is her mother's absence, her unavailability through depression, which Kathleen cannot overcome. Kathleen's intent search for "proof" of Marianne and Mullan's love is a petrified recreation of her mother's search for "passion . . . the thing she was pursuing as she trawled through novel after novel". She reworks the affair between the two over and over, each time creating another story. Entangled in these imaginative possibilities, Kathleen puts back together her brother's version of their family and the alternative love story suggested by her adoring lover. In some ways this novel is choice Nuala O'Faolain, for women's experience of Irish society is written all over the pages of this book and evokes the author's powerful political and social commentaries on Irish life.
This novel is interesting in many more ways, however: in the solitariness of the heroine, in its embodied pleasures and, especially, the healing presence of the male characters who do all of the mammying here. O'Faolain gives readers a wellcrafted, though not a happy book: a work, in fact, of mourning which overtly locates a reservoir of anger and grief that women feel about women, in a way that is significantly unexplored in Irish fiction.
Kathy Cremin is a lecturer in English at Bradford University. She is among the con- tributors to New Voices in Irish Criticism, edited by P.J.Matthews (Four Courts Press, 2000)