THE title encapsulates neatly the main concerns of Ita Daly's protagonist, Belle Meyers. Now a middle aged loner working as a gardener in the grounds of a mental institution in Dublin, Belle slowly begins to reconstruct her troubled past. Her memories have been long repressed because of a major trauma the nature of which only emerges towards the end of the book.
Along the way she ponders the meaning and nuances of religious faith and political allegiance, as well as questioning the whole process of the way the mind records events and the significance of the act of remembering itself. Ultimately she finds lasting spiritual sustenance only in the natural cycles of life in her garden: "Easy to see where the idea of resurrection came from, standing in a garden."
Belle came to Dublin as a child, emigrating from postwar Germany with her young, stylish mother (Mutti) and redoubtable doctor grandmother (Buba). Daly's narrative is at its strongest while describing Belle's sheltered early life, cosseted with affection by her grandmother, and fed with German delicacies by her pretty mother. She slowly grows beyond this outwardly cosy home life and begins to find a place for herself in the Irish society she initially finds so foreign.
As time goes by, Belle is increasingly aware of the secret conflicts that lie beneath the surface of her own family as well as beneath the surface of Irish life. She has been told that she is Jewish, yet why does her grandmother convert to Catholicism with such ease? And why does Buba dote so much on Father Jack the priest who has helped them to get settled in Ireland?
Belle is also fascinated by the hidden rifts and faction fighting within the Socialist Workers Party, whose meetings she attends under the influence of her feisty history teacher, Mona McGrath: "I was to learn that paranoia was the only thing that kept the members of the Socialist Workers Party together".
Belle's response to the hidden tensions she finds all around her is to gather her own secrets: hiding her Jewish boyfriend and her involvement with socialism from her family, and maintaining a detached scepticism in her observation of the machinations of the Party (including the sexism a anti semitism she discovers in its ranks).
The novel gathers speed and force as it unravels the reactions, in Dublin to the Hungarian uprising of 1956, with the non Stalinist members of the Workers Party trying to distinguish their support for the rebels from that of the Catholic church. Although the fate of Mona McCarthy, who wants to "walk into history", is predictable, Daly extracts sardonic humour out of her convent school employers' misinterpretation of Mona's intentions: "In school, we hung out the bunting. Mother de Lourdes festooned the building with papal flags and Irish tricolours to honour our own Irish, Catholic, martyr."
One of Ita Daly's trademarks is her gimlet humour. Here is Belle, caustic on the subject of saintly men: "Maybe saints don't need excuses .. . None of them could resist a desert or a hermitage, a tyrant, a murderer, a rapist, any old excuse to get them out of the washing up or driving the kids to swimming on a Saturday morning."
Belle has wonderful insight into her relationship with Father Jack: "Father Jack and I were mortal enemies, and enemies, like lovers, share insights." Yet Daly's portrayal of the all too unctuous and manipulative priest too often descends into the sort of caricature that is not evident in her evocation of the other characters in the novel.
The upshot of Belle's tardy but inevitable decoding of her family's secrets into unwelcome revelations smacks rather of 19th century melodrama. Nevertheless, her intriguing story unfolds in a way that maintains suspense while staying true to the haphazard path of a mind rediscovering its hidden past. I could have done without the overstated cliche in the last paragraph, however: "in fact, truth, far from being universal, was something locked within each individual heart."