Mary McGreevy, by Walter Keady MacMurray & Beck, 263pp, $24
Bennett & Company, by J. M. O'Neill Mount Eagle, 281pp, £7.99
These two novels fall into that broad category of recent Irish fiction that tends to romanticise some of the most harrowing periods the State has ever known. While there is a spate of such novels currently on the market (no small thanks to Frank McCourt's outstanding success with Angela's Ashes), Mary McGreevy and Bennett & Company are both a cut above the rest.
Set in Kildawree, Co Mayo, in the 1950s, Keady's novel is a harrowing story of parochial narrowmindedness that is vaguely reminiscent of Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. Mary McGreevy, whose singular integrity and tenacity upset the status quo, is the subject of the village's endemic tongue-wagging.
A compelling character, she breaks all social and moral norms of rural Ireland of the time by soliciting a father for the child she wishes to bear and raise without any intention of entering into marriage. What makes matters worse, as far as her neighbours are concerned, is that Mary McGreevy stalwartly refuses to name the father of her child.
She is no ordinary single parent, for having spent the first 16 years of her adulthood as a nun, she is literally hell-bent on now living her own life, whatever the cost. A refreshing variation on the "spoilt priest", Mary McGreevy is also magnetically beautiful, to the point of stirring even the loins of the ever-correct Father John Patrick Mulroe PP. The villagers speculate wickedly that Father Mulroe could have fathered her child; but the pathetically shy Jack Banaghan is also a remote possibility, as is Mary's old school love, Kevin Kelly.
There is barely a man in the parish - eligible or otherwise - above the suspicion of Kildawree's populace. To compound matters even further, outwardly prim Kitty Malone Tarragh wishes she had fathered Mary's child. Despite the havoc, Mary tenaciously hangs on to her right to conceal the paternity of her daughter and graciously refuses the many (far too many) proposals of marriage that come her way.
As in his first novel, Celibates and Other Lovers (published long before Angela's Ashes), Keady here treats the rigidity of postwar rural Ireland with a mixture of sympathy and contempt. While the book is satisfying on the whole, the first half is unduly hesitant in pace, almost as if Keady didn't quite trust his American readers to grasp the subtleties of rural Ireland without explanation.
While it is unlikely to prompt a new bus tour of Limerick, O'Neill's Bennett & Company is a well-crafted portrayal of the city's divisive sectarianism in the early years of the Republic. The gas-lit streets in the novel are fraught with political and sectarian tensions. Ireland's own soldiers and gardai are ill-equipped, lacking experience and thoroughly corrupt; few Protestant families have remained and their Georgian houses are either falling into decay or occupied by squatters. The one factor that acknowledges no socio-economic or religious divide is Limerick's raging diphtheria epidemic.
In the midst of conflict and widespread misery, mild-mannered Edward Burke, principal of the Hugh Latimer Primary School, and a Catholic, suffers his elderly and venomous mother and loves with every fibre of his being his wife, Lillian nee Bennett, 10 years his senior and one of Limerick's few remaining Protestants.
The Bennetts were once a highly respected Limerick family of professional men and church-going women whose lineage could be traced beyond the original Charter of the city. In 1928, however, they are targets of the residual anger of those Catholic men and women who presume all Protestants to be colonists and usurpers of fundamental human rights. The soup kitchen in which Lillian volunteers is fire-bombed; the families of diphtheria victims whom her doctor brother has treated unsuccessfully accuse him of neglect on sectarian grounds.
Edward Burke, too, because of his inherent honesty, his goodness, as much as because of his mixed marriage, is targeted and beaten and tested to his limits, but eventually emerges as the worthiest, if most unlikely, of heroes.
Bennett & Company is beautifully wrought. At all times subtle and sensitive, O'Neill presumes the intelligence of his readers and portrays a city that was, in many ways, ephemeral and otherworldly despite being black with filth, corruption, disease and hatred.