Tara Road by Maeve Binchy Orion 488pp, £16.99 in UK
Heroin addiction, adultery, teenage pregnancies - hang on a second. This is the new Maeve Binchy novel, right? Regular readers need not fear, however. Though Tara Road acknowledges that such things exist in contemporary Ireland, Binchy hasn't gone gritty or turned tough; Maeve Binchy's Ireland is still a place of essential decency and close-knit - sometimes too close for comfort - humanity. The story opens with a happy ending. Shy little Ria from the estate agent's office marries handsome, charming Danny, who contrives, within fifteen pages, to start up his own business and buy them a dream house, a rambling, down-at-heel Victorian mansion on one of Dublin's most desirable roads. Clearly this can't last - and sure enough, two children, a cat, a houseful of antique furniture and many, many trays of scones and treacle tarts later, Danny announces that he has fallen in love with a teenager called Bernadette, that she is pregnant, and that he is leaving.
The reader - not to mention just about everybody in the book - has had grave doubts about Danny from the start, but Ria is shattered by the revelation, and when a woman she has never met before rings up from America and asks if her husband could possibly put her in touch with someone who would like to do a house exchange for the summer, she finds herself blurting out the whole sorry story. By the time the conversation is over, Ria is headed for Westville, Connecticut and a superficially cold fish by the name of Marilyn Vine is on her way to Tara Road.
A painful and hilarious couple of months later, we reach the end of the summer and of the story. But it's not a question of everyone living happily ever after; in fact, if this is a survey of the state of marriage at the end of the millennium, happy ever after wouldn't appear to be on offer. Ria's sister Hilary is married to a penny-pinching teacher who, once he discovers her to be infertile, won't sleep with her. Danny's business mentor, Barney McCarthy, keeps mousey wife Mona at home and glamorous mistress Polly for the social scene and weekends away. The American couple are on a trial separation; Ria's friend Gertie is shackled to an alcoholic who takes her money and thumps her by way of thanks. As for Ria, Danny, their spiky teenagers Annie and Brian and the waif-like Bernadette, well, it's a brutal situation, and Binchy doesn't shy away from it. "But you all get on so well," Annie's friend Kitty remarks at one point, when Annie is grumbling about the prospect of spending a holiday cooped up on a boat on the Shannon with her dad and his new girlfriend. "I thought you'd hate her taking your mother's place and everything." "No, she hasn't taken Mam's place, she's just made a new place," is Annie's unexpectedly thoughtful reply.
There is always a moment of mild astonishment when you turn the final page of a Maeve Binchy novel and look up, only to discover that the characters don't actually live in your house. Though this is her twelfth book there is no whiff of tedium, no suspicion of a jaded formula; she is an extraordinarily adept storyteller, and when it comes to creating the sort of people you might meet at a bus stop or in a delicatessen, she is quite simply streets ahead of her rivals in the bestseller business. However lightly this book brushes against the problems of contemporary Ireland, from drug deals being done in restaurants to out-of-control property prices, its strength is summed up in the person of 11-year-old Brian, who can be relied on to put his foot in it, asking the question that nobody wants asked, letting slip the vital piece of information that everybody wants kept quiet. He is, it's true, a useful fictional tool: but everybody knows a Brian, and they aren't always 11 years old.