Reading Ireland Month: Dublin 4 by Maeve Binchy

I had just read Maeve Binchy's Dublin 4 for my own #projectplaces when I discovered that, thanks to Cathy at 746 Books, this is Reading Ireland Month - what luck to be able to participate in a themed read about a country I love with a book by one of my most beloved writers. 

Maeve Binchy has been one of my slightly guilty pleasures ever since I first read Light A Penny Candle many, many years ago.

That novel tells the story of Elizabeth, a shy English girl, going to stay with her single mother's old friend in rural Ireland just after the war, and then follows the fortunes of both families through the years that follow. As the shy only child of a single mother in suburban London, this story could have been mine; I first went to Ireland in the early 1980s, invited by a friend to spend Christmas with her dairy-farming family in County Waterford. I had rarely been outside the city; my notions of farming came largely from Enid Blyton's Famous Five and Ruby Ferguson's books about ponies. (My mother's notions about Ireland came largely from the newspaper; so far as she was concerned I'd no doubt be blown up by the Provisional IRA the minute I got off the ferry.) 

To say that first visit was a culture shock is to put it mildly, but I loved it - from being a temporary part of a huge down-to-earth family, to seeing shrines to Mary along the roadside as we ventured out to visit numerous friends and relations, and even to attending Mass at which the priest promised eternal damnation to those who deviated from the path, Ireland was another world. It was a world perfectly captured by Maeve, whose ear for Irish speech and observations of Irish daily life are surely second to none.

As it happens, my Irish friends don't see Maeve in entirely the same light. Whilst acknowledging her popularity, they find her writing over-sentimental and sometimes cloying. It's not what our lives are really like, they say. We have moved on, Ireland is now a progressive, modern country. But whilst this is all true, I still love Maeve's books. Light A Penny Candle remains my favourite because it spoke to me so personally, but I've read and enjoyed many more of her novels. This time I turned to Dublin 4, a collection of short stories set in one small part of the city; each one is a gem.

In Dinner at Donnybrook, Carmel plans a dinner party. Her adult children, with their smart lives, important jobs and weekend cottages in Kerry, are wary; why is she doing this, and will she (who has in the past had a breakdown, for reasons at first unclear) be able to cope? Carmel is irritated, 'Everyone felt they could patronise her and pat her on the head. Even her own daughter.' Her friends, on receiving their handwritten invitations are shocked - 'Poor Carmel that we have to be nice to because Dermot is a good sort...' But Carmel has a plan, one involving what she calls a Most Important Lady. And she also has an ally, a friend from way back, one who escaped from the suffocating moral strictures of 1950s Ireland. Joe owes Carmel, and with his help her plan is brought to fruition in a very effective way. 

In Flat in Ringsend Jo, a girl from the country, is initiated into city life by her two savvy flatmates Nessa and Pauline, and in Decision in Belfield, Pat tries to find out what has happened to Cathy, her pregnant, unmarried sister who fled to London, as did many a girl in her situation - but the truth turns out to be quite unexpected, and not just for Cathy.

The final story, Murmurs in Montrose, is the best. It's about Emma, her recovering alcoholic husband Gerry, their families and their friends, and it is is a searing, heartbreaking study of the effects that this disease has on everyone it touches. From Gerry's denying mother;

'there had never been any scandal in her life before and there wasn't going to be any now.'

to Father Vincent, the well-meaning local priest, Des, Gerry's unreformed friend, Jack, his lonely brother, and especially to Emma, who struggles to keep the family together, makes excuses for all Gerry's faults, who subtly manages his access to alcohol, car keys and money, jollies him along and bears his complaints and criticisms, every character is real, as is the desperate, isolating awfulness of living with someone who cannot escape the grip of the drink, and who blames and justifies all the time while knowing, deep-down, what everyone thinks of him.

Above all, it's a story about loneliness.

'Emma realised one day during that endless summer that she had no friend....there was nobody she could talk to about Gerry.'

Maeve Binchy was a quintessentially Irish author but she was also a brilliant observer of the wider human condition, of the little things that make us, and that make us so easily able to identify with the people in her stories. Her characters are always nuanced, her portraits of them are, like their creator, full of empathy and understanding. 

Maeve had begun her career in teaching and journalism, getting up at 5.30am to write fiction. When she died she had written many novels, short stories, a play, non-fiction, and radio and television dramas, and had become a 'national treasure.' Her books are not always cosy, but they are, unfailingly, kind.