GRACE. By Paul Lynch. Oneworld, £12.99 sterling
Irish book blurbs are getting out of hand. Time was when we were famous as a nation of begrudgers, but nowadays our writers can do no wrong – at least among their fellow authors, who would have us believe they’re all geniuses.
When Paul Lynch’s The Black Snow, was published in 2014, Colum McCann marvelled at its author’s “sensational gift for a sentence”, a sentiment shared by Colm Toibin, who confessed to “savouring the book sentence by sentence”. Sebastian Barry, too, was smitten by Lynch’s “new and wonderful language”.
Three years later the praise for Lynch’s new novel is even more unrestrained. For Edna O’Brien, Grace is “beautifully written”, while Emma Donoghue deems it “shudderingly well-written” and American novelist Matthew Thomas is “stunned” by the “surpassing beauty” of this “masterwork”.
Then there’s Donal Ryan, who hails “a mesmerising, incandescent work of art…an exhilarating, Odyssean, heart-pounding, glorious story” from “an absolute master”. Indeed, Ryan predicts that the book’s title character “will be one of the enduring heroines of world literature”.
That places her in the company of Elizabeth Bennet, Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina, Hedda Gabler and Molly Bloom, not to mention the great female figures in Homer and Shakespeare, and it does Lynch no favours to make such a daft claim.
You can, if you wish, find Homeric parallels in this story of a young teenage girl setting out on a perilous odyssey through famine-ravaged Ireland, and there’s no denying the storytelling verve that Lynch brings to her adventures – misadventures, mainly, as she encounters a motley crew of dodgy characters and gets into all sorts of scrapes, some of them murderous.
Yet despite all that happens to her, she doesn’t really grow as a character, and though lengthy passages are spent evoking her fears, furies and fevered imaginings, she remains curiously one-dimensional, a somewhat blurred figure at the heart of the action. Indeed, it’s hard to picture what she even looks like.
That’s what can happen with prose so intent on calling attention to itself that other crucial fiction-writing elements end up losing out. As was evident in his two previous novels, Lynch is in love with words, which pile on to his pages in adjective-strewn nouns, archaic inversions, flamboyant metaphors and sentences without main subjects.
This is writing as showmanship and while some readers will revel in its linguistic exhuberance others may feel throughout the book’s 455 pages that the author might occasionally give it a rest.
Here and there, the political and social dimensions of the country’s famine plight is directly addressed, as when one of Grace’s fellow wanderers rails against “the have-it-alls and well-to-doers who don’t give a fuck what is happening to the ordinary people”, but then it’s back to battling through the clotted prose that keeps getting in the way of the story.
