Hard men and tender women in a rural tale of redemption

Here in No Place
A. W. Timmons
New Island
€16.99

When one reads that A.W. Timmons is a graduate of the MA creative writing course at UCD, one is made slightly wary of the putative danger of creating writing schools homogenising art and churning it into a certain bourgeois acceptability, and perhaps sanitising its individual edge.
The mimetic is evident in the work of this Wicklow writer: McGahern’s influence in the rough rural setting with male characters addressed by surname; and the small town gossip is reminiscent of Brinsley McNamara’s Valley of the Squinting Windows, while the idea of a stranger arriving in a small town reminds one of MacConmara’s An Coimhthíoch.
However that said, Timmons for the most part rises above the alleged homogenising and mimesis to present with his own voice in this largely impressive debut novel. The story is a recapturing of the past. Murt Doran’s life fell apart eighteen years previously when his wife Cathy was killed in a car which he should have been driving, and his daughter Gráinne was taken away from him and adopted. Credulity is stretched somewhat by our having to wait such a long time for Murt’s guilt to set in, and in his wish to contact Gráinne again, and one has to buy into how he spent his time in the interim in a caravan where ‘routine kept me alive’.
He returns to the town eventually where the tragedies occurred and where he used to work in a saw mill with low-life Sticks Foley who, later enigmatically, is made the adoptive father of Gráinne and becomes gentrified into the bargain to be known henceforth as Mr Christopher Foley. Murt survives in the town now as a handyman and resides in a guest house.
While Irishisms and colloquialisms abound and stereotypical people inhabit the inevitable pub in their nosiness and begrudgery, or stand staring when a car from a different county passes through as if they have nothing else to do or think about in these small places, one wonders initially if it is not all a bit outdated. Has the world not moved on, and are people today not too busy with their own lives and perhaps more indifferent to others than heretofore? However, such apparent platitudes are well made up for by the sometimes striking originality in the prose: ‘The place was like a sick aunt, sharp-tongued and pale with spite;’ and the rounds custom is brilliantly described with its supposed raison d’être of generosity leading some of its proponents to a life of alcoholism; or when Murt visits the city, he looks for gaps in the buildings, a metaphor for the gaps in his own life.
The story is not without humour as when the inebriated Ursula, who shares the guesthouse with Murt, enquired of him when he was restoring a carbide lamp in the shed, if it was a rocket he was building ‘to take you away from here’.
While we get intimations of Murt’s feelings for his dead wife, his feelings for his daughter by contrast seem at times distant, lacking the poignancy to drive the narrative forward; and one wonders did the law not have something to say about the ease in which the Foleys snatched Gráinne away from her father and seemed to have no difficulty in claiming her as their own adoptive daughter.
Also, one needs to suspend disbelief to accept the transforming maturation in the character of Cathy’s jealous sister Helen and how she wound up as Foley’s wife; and while one understands the author’s purpose here to show a non-one dimensional character—a villain with a redeeming quality, Foley’s confession of male inadequacy is not totally convincing.
Timmons captures the seasonal toil of rural life convincingly and blends the description of nature very well into the narrative’s mystery: ‘The mountains were alive, their backs arched as if in anticipation.’
Also the saw mill is authentically brought to life with its tumbling logs and chain saws in language as stark as the teeming imprecations of the workers. It is an interesting contrast to the softening of the prose when he is writing about the female characters with the use of their first names.
There seems to be a reluctance in the writer to name real places. The main setting for the novel is the fictitious village of Kiltuam. While we can guess the references to Glendalough and Bray from the descriptions, the only real geographical entity actually named is Roscommon and that occurs three pages from the end.
Despite all that, this work in the main is a gripping and page-turning mystery that holds a reader’s attention in its slow dripfeed to its satisfying conclusion. Murt, on beholding the wonder and freedom in his daughter, makes us reflect on what keeps us going in the end: the hope for future generations, that they might get it right.

Review by James Lawless in Books Ireland, May/June 2014. Issue No. 355