Review
Foolish Mortals (Headline Review)
Ah! Sweet Frailty!
Des Kenny salutes the doyenne of Irish fiction for her continuing ability to produce work that is contemporary and intriguing, despite the weight of her reputation.
There is a tendency that, as a writer becomes more established, she or he is expected to write about certain things in a more or less defined manner. No more than artists in any discipline, it is a comforting mantle for the writer to take on and too many of them take refuge in it. The natural result is that their books follow a ready-set routine and their audience see in that routine something of a comfort zone. The downturn to that, of course, is that the books tend to become flat and uninteresting.
It is of course also true that for the writer to break away from the recognised path she or he has chosen and to venture again into uncharted waters, an immense artistic courage is required as not only is there a danger of losing the hard won audience, but there is also the possibility that the writer may end up losing confidence in her or his art.
Over the years, the theme of many of Jennifer Johnston’s novels has been the fate of the ascendancy in the new modern and independent Ireland. The dilapidated ‘Big House’ and the ‘Relics of Auld Decency’ that lived within have formed the core of her work and established her as one of Ireland’s finest novelists of the twentieth century. She has occasionally strayed away from this area, only to return there with a vengeance and in her last two novels there was an air of closure and a general impression that that was that.
Opening and reading the first few pages of her new novel Foolish Mortals, the reader could be excused for thinking that perhaps the title is an oblique reference to the author herself, in that we seem at least initially to be swimming in an uncertain sea, the only thing keeping us going is the remarkable storytelling talent that has always been Johnston’s trademark. As the reader moves further into the book however, a core theme develops that is as refreshing as it is intriguing.
Purportedly about a wildly dysfunctional family, their dysfunctionality (if the term can be used) turns out to be a smoke screen for the real concern of the book, the problem of an aging parent. In the personage of Tash, Johnston has created one of the most remarkable characters of modern Irish fiction. Tash is the aging mother everybody would like somebody else to have so that they could enjoy her eccentricities without having to live with her.
Initially presented as a mother out of hell, as the novel progresses and she is stripped gradually, through an encroaching senility, of her social crutches, a rare maternal human being emerges with occasional sharp insights and a slight existentialist outlook. Just before her swansong, for it is no less than that, the reader finds her standing in the middle of her drawing room:
“Do I know who I was?
What did I do with my life?
What is life?
Another word.
Why am I sitting in my best clothes?
Why am I?”
The book is imbued with a whole series of staged melodramas, some of which are touched with an element of farce. Tears are dropped galore. There are grandiose gestures, dramatic confessions, almost sit-com vignettes of contemporary Irish life suggesting perhaps that the book is intended to be an understated satire of modern Irish society. But through it all, the author’s empathy for the human condition, in all its peccadilloes, and its struggles for acceptance in an uncaring society is evident.
Foolish Mortals is a curious novel, exposing the caricatures of modern Irish living while asking some rather uncomfortable questions. One wonders what Mr and Mrs Cook think of it all. Perhaps Johnston will reveal all in her next novel.
