Buy these books

Wendy Earle
posted 19 April 2006

Both of these novels touch on important moments in Irish history, though at two very different periods: at the beginning and the end of the 20th century.

The Picture She Took is set in the 1920s and tells the story of a young English woman who was a nurse in the Flanders battlefields at the end of World War I, and a young Englishman who was a mercenary in the Black and Tans in the southwest of Ireland. The Black and Tans were a ruthless reserve of the Royal Irish Constabulary, mainly made up of recruits from England, set up to suppress rebellion in the south of Ireland and defeat the IRA.

Daniel, wounded in an ambush in Cork and living with his parents in south London, sees a photograph taken by Jude, an aspiring photographer, of two soldiers sharing a cigarette in the trenches. For some reason the photograph stirs up unwelcome memories and emotions and Daniel feels driven to uncover the connection between the two men. When he meets Jude she is drawn to him and finds herself wanting to help him in his quest for answers. Her own experience of settling back into a routine existence after the excitement and camaraderie of working in the trenches leaves her searching for meaning in a ruptured world. The mystery of Daniel's mental anguish seems to provide a focus for this search.

The novel is, on the whole, beautifully written, evoking a strong sense of physical time and place, and telling a compelling story, but some of the psychological and political detail is dubious. The ideological undercurrent in the novel represents the Black and Tans' war on the IRA largely in neutral tones, equating the Black and Tans' brutal campaign to suppress rebellion with the IRA's violence in challenging British hegemony in their country. In my view the two sides were not equally evil and I can't accept Shaw's representation of the war in Ireland as little more that a destructive battle between two brutal mobs.

In fact, the novel is emotionally and psychologically set very much in the 21st century. The southwest of Ireland is represented in cosy nostalgic tones - a country of nutritious, home-cooked food and friendly, guileless, open people who invite strangers into their homes and hearts without hesitation. Jude even has the stock friend of a 21st century single independent woman - the gay man, who just seems a tad too comfortable with his sexual orientation for someone living in that time.

Nothing Simple is the story of a young woman who is uprooted from her home and friends, leaving an economically destitute Ireland with her new husband at the beginning of the 1980s to find work in the United States. Written in the style of a memoir, with snatched and chronologically ordered memories of a recent past, (it seems as if it could be based on the life of the author, but there is no explicit indication that this is so), it depicts the experiences of Ray, the narrator, as she tries to come to terms with and make the best of a life that is essentially rootless. This must have been a fairly common experience for many young Irish people, who as part of the Irish diaspora in the 20th century, left their country for the United States in search of a future.

The relaxed, matter-of-fact, observational style of the novel nicely captures Ray's attempts gradually to put down roots in a country so very different from her own, with no family but only passing friendships to help her. She and her husband, with their growing family, end up settling in an arid suburb of Houston, Texas, where Ray chronicles the day-to-day struggles of herself and her neighbours, not well-off but not quite poor, to make the best of what life offers, and to get along with each other.

The opening narrative device that causes Ray to reflect back on her life over the past decade is her 10 year-old daughter's disappearance at the point when the family is about to uproot themselves to return to Ireland. Having worked so hard to make a life for herself and her family in Houston, her daughter's militant resistance compounds Ray's own ambivalence about the move. They will be returning to an Ireland transformed by a booming economy, very different from the country they left.

While set in very different times and places both novels are of the 21st century. Of the two I prefer Lia Mills' book. In not attempting to write a historical or psychological novel she does not fall into the trap of imposing a historically dubious psychology on her subjects. The novel somehow seems more true to the experiences of the people she is writing about. Shaw's novel may be more ambitious in trying to connect with a difficult period of Irish history and explore its impact on two individuals, but her characters somehow fail to ring true to the period in which they live.