22 Feb 2013 19:08:50
The novel opens in the summer of 1976 which, as its title suggests, experienced a heatwave of legendary proportions. In the third month of the drought that stifles London, encrusting it with red-backed aphids and fuelling acts of insanity, Robert Riordan goes out to get his morning paper, as he has done for over 30 years, while Gretta Riordan bakes bread and the couple's three adult children pursue seemingly ordinary lives elsewhere. But today, Robert is home later than usual. Gretta "calls her husband's name, once, twice. The flank of the garden wall throws the sound back to her." He has disappeared.
This act instantly dismantles a flimsy family structure balanced between rebellion and conformity. Gretta has "done her best to keep Ireland alive in her London-born children", providing Irish dancing classes, regular church attendance and holidays to Connemara, yet has bred Londoners with minds and grievances of their own. The oldest, Michael Francis, is the one who never got away. As a student, precocious fatherhood and domesticity have disposed of his dreams ("I was going to do my PhD, sleep with everyone I could lay my hands on, then go to America" ). He teaches at a grammar school and rents a flat near his childhood home.
At this pivotal point, chaos has descended: his children are newly neglected in favour of his wife's Open University degree; she leaves the house in squalor, and is busy finding feminism and herself while her husband stumbles through the dinosaur mists of patriarchy. This is a painful portrait of a marriage whose failure reflects the politics of an era, as well as a wincingly true depiction of reality in conflict with fantasy. O'Farrell skilfully portrays women's lives in the 1970s, poised between oppression and progress, and the prejudice experienced by the Irish in England.
In the meantime, the middle Riordan, Monica, is suffering her own rural hell in the company of hostile stepdaughters after a broken marriage. Having lost a child, Monica is flailing. Strangely, though both her personality and dilemma are affecting, there is a chill to her character – her siblings are far more appealing.
We journey into the past, with Gretta unexpectedly pregnant with her third baby: the lifelong source of worry that is Aoife. A child of the 1950s, the illiteracy that is Aoife's "own private truth" is, of course, undiagnosed dyslexia, and O'Farrell's descriptions of words jumping and sliding away are disturbingly effective. In adulthood, Aoife ups and leaves the family home for New York, where work and romance are blighted by her condition.
These are ordinary lives acutely observed, with a brilliant dissection of different generations' attitudes towards the same predicament. Only Robert's disappearance can bring the Riordans scurrying back home – and it is here that the pace slackens. As the protagonists wilt in the heat, limply theorising about what might have happened, the same lassitude and claustrophobia set in for the reader. The Riordans wait for something, and so do we. But O'Farrell is too skilful a writer to lose her readers: she cuts to the chase in the nick of time, re-routing the quest to Ireland where she picks up slack threads for an ending that is revelatory, redemptive and moving.
"Strange weather brings out strange behaviour", and what could be a glib construct in a lesser writer is so well handled that it serves to strengthen the novel's structure. This is essentially a series of character studies and an examination of family dynamics, but with a plot sufficiently substantial to carry it. As ever with O'Farrell, it is her manipulation of time that infuses the most humdrum of stories with brilliance and suspense. Decades are travelled seamlessly, sometimes mid-sentence, without ever obfuscating.
Here is an author whose depth and insight hover just below the surface of an apparently effortless lightness. She can capture "a slight wrinkle in the atmosphere" in passing, the popular and the profound almost disarmingly intermingled. There is a deliciousness to this novel, a warmth and readability that render it unputdownable and will surely make it a hit. She's done it again.
