Fiction: For more than a decade Siobhan Parkinson has been one of Ireland's most prolific writers for children and teenagers, writes Yvonne Nolan.
Her 14 titles to date include Sisters . . . no way!, the Bisto Book of the Year award-winning story of two teenagers coping with parental loss through marital breakdown and the tragedy of a mother's death.
This autumn sees her first foray into adult fiction with The Thirteenth Room, a novel whose title references a Grimm folktale featuring a vengeful, baby-snatching Virgin Mary and which Parkinson uses in abridged translation at the start of the book.
Nurse Niamh Lawlor leaves her career in a city hospital when she is offered the more lucrative job of caring for the terminally ill Taggart at his ancestral home and stud farm, Planten. The real power at Planten, though, is Elise Taggart, not her stroke-silenced husband, and beyond her love for her intellectually impaired son, Johnny, Elise's guiding motives are manipulative and selfish ones. With a salute to Jane Eyre and Tess of the D'Urbervilles it soon becomes clear to Niamh that an ingénue should never mess with the "gintry" because they are forever harbouring dark secrets. In this case, a 14-year-old cousin of Mrs Taggart died in childbirth in a Planten outhouse nine years previously (definite shades of Granard here) and Niamh begins to suspect that her sometime lover, local teacher and artist manqué, Redmond, may have been the baby's father.
Of all the characters rattling around Planten and its neighbouring village, Dromadden, Elise is easily the most complex and absorbing. Parkinson has given her dimensions beyond the merely malign and shows her to be a creature of her environment. When she arranges a dinner party to mark Niamh's arrival at Planten, Parkinson tells us "The whole enterprise was essentially cold-hearted, but it was hardly cruel; indeed it had the advantage, from Elise's point of view, of appearing to be rather kind".
Setting a Big House novel in Ireland of the 1990s (though it feels like the 1960s) is a somewhat risky enterprise unless one aims either to subvert or embellish the genre. Siobhan Parkinson does neither and instead presents a collection of standard archetypes: the idiot child, the chilly chatelaine, the enraged master, the gossipy help and the artist Lothario. Set alongside some rather clunky plot devices where exposition occurs via implausibly odd newspaper clippings and Taggart's interior monologues the overall impression is of unevenness and predictability. Despite Parkinson's very obvious writerly skills, the disparate elements of this novel fail to hang together to produce a satisfactory whole.
Yvonne Nolan is a journalist and critic
The Thirteenth Room By Siobhan Parkinson The Blackstaff Press, 227pp. £6.99