`Sometimes they spoke as though the country were becoming uninhabited, as though the lands between the dying houses were all empty and laid to waste. It was like Africa, Hannie thought, the white talk of No one-lives-here-anymore, when they meant No Whites."
Believe it or not, we are in today's rural Waterford. Hannie, a dubious, nay, dusky-skinned adventuress has married the retired explorer, Ned Renvyle, and dropped from a lifetime amongst the expats of Africa into a cold, wet and even more limited world. The tribe she has joined is described as "Anglo-Irish", but apart from a few crumbling houses and prodigious quantities of gin, there are scant signs of the accents and totems which set that breed apart. Indeed, the evidence of Kerry Hardie's first novel suggests that these people are simply Southern Irish Protestants, an endangered species, certainly, but one far more "native" than she suggests, and recognised for its own suicidal tendency to mix and intermarry.
This matters, because the writer seems bent on deconstructing Irish life through the eyes of Hannie Bennet. Unfortunately, that deeply solipsistic character has no interest in the country or its natives. She has lived off men all her life and made this marriage (her fifth) to provide some security for her delinquent son, Joss. When the teenager arrives, he grows dangerously attached to Niamh, the young artist living in Ned's dairy cottage. Niamh is the book's token Catholic, and therefore doomed; occasional forays by her lover from Belfast supply some unlikely links with Provothink across the border. She also helps articulate the author's crazy version of Irish social history, such as making the point that, as a Catholic, "twenty years ago she might have been in the cottage, but she wouldn't have been in the diningroom.". . !
Perhaps the story would be a little more believable if set in the Six Counties. According to the blurb, the author comes from Bangor (though she now lives in Co Kilkenny). She makes the common mistake of her compatriots in assuming that the rest of the island thinks as she does. Her observations echo both sides of the Ulster conflict, with facile comparisons between themselves and the embattled citizens of Africa, either black or white. This coexists with offensive racist musings by almost all the characters about the colour of Hannie's skin.
Kerry Hardie is a poet. She writes best when she interrupts the tale to describe Ireland's natural history and rain. Yet if she had looked beyond the woods and trees to describe individuals rather than tribes, her novel might have said something interesting about the social climate of the Republic; which has become a good deal warmer than she has apparently noticed.
Aisling Foster is a novelist and critic