The "beloved stranger" of Clare Boylan's title will suggest for her established readers familiar territory, because strangers transform characters' lives in her previous novels, Holy Pictures (1983), Black Baby (1988) and Room for a Single Lady (1997). This, however, is a story of a kind too often hidden - a demented elderly man who becomes a stranger not only to his wife and daughter, but to himself.
Lily and Dick have been married for fifty years, and Dick has presided, glumly and fussily, over the family's domestic life, finally ageing into a sweet old man. Marriage, Lily explains to their daughter, Ruth, is "nothing you could write a book about" - it is a matter of habit, of acclimatisation, in which appreciating "all that the other had to put up with" makes the couple "pals". After a lifetime of placating Dick, and of doubts about her wasted energies, Lily believes "she had at last taught Dick the skill of accommodation."
Then one night, shortly after the frugal Dick has apparently begun making imprudent investments, Lily wakes to find him crawling under the bed with a shotgun. He has spotted an intruder and has him in his sights. When Lily turns on the light, Dick re-emerges, explaining: "Bugger got away when you created a diversion". For years, Lily has warned Ruth that Dick "will go mad" if either woman offends his sense of propriety. Now Dick seethes with fear, anger and resentment, and rapidly loses his own particular sense of decorum, becoming convinced that people are lying to him, stealing from him, that Lily has other lovers and that she thinks him "useless."
Boylan writes compassionately about what a person might do if his or her loved-one of many years were to become deranged. She is perceptive about how couples give up parts of their individual personalities to accommodate each other. So when Dick becomes lost to her and her daughter, Lily is still bound to him. She not only has to grieve for him, but also has to regain lost parts of herself. As Dick loses his mind, Lily finds hers, and, partly inspired by her secret reading of Ruth's feminist library, she makes her bid for independence and runs away from home.
Metaphors of houses not only reflect the theme of psychic accommodation, but also represent the politics of domestic life as shaped less by individuals than by external communal structures, so that Dick, too, is shown as damaged by his role as patriarch.
Entwined with the collapse and re-invention of Lily's and Dick's selves is another story. Boylan deftly locates the conflicts of responsibility and debts of duty between parents and their children. Ruth wants to get back at her dad, feeling that he did not notice her and sensing that her arrival had disturbed the balance of things between the young couple.
Freud is directly invoked in the novel when Tim, Dick's psychiatrist (another "beloved stranger"), says that "all the triangles of her family had broken up". Although the knowledge that eventually re-connects Ruth to a loving father is obtained through hypnotic regression, a technique Freud abandoned, the Freudian motifs persist.
Boylan's novel is unsentimental, redeeming neither regrets nor wasted moments - Dick's letter of remorseful and loving apology to Lily is left in the pocket of his suit, and is read only by a stranger in a charity shop. It is a mark of how faithfully Boylan has rendered Dick's illness that the novel's ending seems immoderately optimistic, resolving all the conflicted pairings rather too lightly. But Boylan's irresistible desire to celebrate women's resilience above all else is her great charm for readers.
Kathy Cremin is a critic and a researcher at the University of York