READING ALL WE SHALL KNOW

In your hand, this book – is it a novella? A short novel? - is a confidently beautiful object. Hardback, holding 190 pages, set in 11/15point Electra on soft white paper, offering good contrast for the text, with plenty of white space on the page, cushioned by a clean design, including an elegant font, a fading blue leaf-motif with embossed author name and title on the front cover, accolades by luminaries of the Irish literary world for this and previous work by Donal Ryan on the back cover, ALL WE SHALL KNOW by Donal Ryan is another sure-fire literary hit, sure to be mentioned in the long and the short of all the lists for prizes, as much of his previous work has been. A section of it is available as a pdf. file on the BBC radio site, where it was an 'open book'. Doubleday/Transworld/Penguin/Random House, the complex corporate entity that brings the book before us, give us strong production values and make a fine job of getting ALL WE SHALL KNOW to the reading public.

The story is timed to a pregnancy, running from week fourteen to week forty with a postscript, called post partum. It is mainly told in the voice of Melody Shee, who lapsed from a journalism career that promised much into a downbeat scatter though substitute and one-on-one teaching. Being a journalist means Melody Shee has a strong command of English and the writing benefits from her professional word hoard, though at times, this reader hears the writer's voice too clearly, for instance when one of Melody's teachers is described as 'priapic' for horny, or when the narrator names her husband's penis as his 'john thomas'. When she says that there is 'some irreparable fault in me. There's something broken inside my head that stops me from being normal', the reader wonders at her capacity for such self-analysis. It reads like psychobabble. Try this humdinger of a sentence, a description of a Traveller child, and ask yourself if it's the narrator's not the writer's voice you're getting. “He had the didactic, machine-gun voice of a barroom braggart and the insouciant swagger of a seasoned villain”. Perhaps this is the narrator, in one of a number of the varied registers she uses. Such a gross dismissal of a child means it's no surprise that the narrator can have sex with a seventeen year old Traveller she is teaching (caring for?).

The reading pleasure for this reader increased when the voice changed to that of Mary Crothery, the young Traveller woman who tells the story of her failed marriage, again broken on the rack of conception and child-bearing. We hear her voice, sounding her story.

Every character is broken in the story. The Travellers on the halting site including Martin Toppy the teenager the narrator abuses into a sexual congress that leads to pregnancy. Her father, lonely and lost at home. Her husband Pat who appears to be able to have sex with prostitutes in the city but not with his wife. Pat and Melody's relationship is fetid, though it is never exactly clear why that should be the case. Her husband's mother is straight out of Oirish Central Casting.

The key relationship the narrator has, apart from the self-absorbed relationship with herself, is with a former school-mate, Breedie Flynn. From early on the reader senses Breedie is coming to a bad end, partly because it is flagged up on the book's fly-leaf cover, but also in the manner in which she is presented as odd and an outcast early on, bullied by class-mates and abandoned and denied by her one friend, Melody. The reader is reminded of his own father's remark, while watching tv Westerns, about the cowboy in the white hat – he won't last long. And sure enough, come the first showdown, the cowboy in the white hat, long-foreshadowed for a short life, bites the dust. In this book, it is presumed suicide that does for Breedie early on, though Melody Shee's complicity in the death of her friend is a key driver of the story.

The story's action proceeds in bite-sized chunks of narration and reflection, expertly organised and sequenced to bring the reader along. The reader enters a well-formed world, which, though very small, feels adequate to the matters being addressed. It is the stuff of an extended short story. Set in a community where the ancient Irish game of hurling is important, where her father's voice lilts a form of Hiberno-English and given that Donal Ryan lives outside Limerick city, it suggests we are in a semi-rural area near that city, in the border country of counties Tipperary, Limerick and north Cork. Yet the reader feels he is in a literary Nordic land, cold as Wallander's stare. There is a permafrost feel to the book, though the reader is never clear what seasons we're living through.

At the heart of the matter are madness and transgression. The narrator's mother is mad. The narrator herself is mad. And they join a long-line of contemporary Irish women driven mad simply by being who they are. And of course, they are lustful, in, it appears, unhealthy manners.

It is a brave move by Donal Ryan to write in women's voices and this reader suggests, the work is only partially successful. Perhaps he is too close to the narrator Melody Shee. He is a neat feint away from Mary Crothery, so her voice works better.

Essentially, this is a further instance of highly literate, contemporary confessional writing from semi-rural Ireland; inordinate madness, antic activity and violence among and around Travellers, enough babies to fill a creche, outrageous language and terrifyingly cold relationships. Are Ireland's writers and readers so suffused with self-hatred that these are the matters that draws them? Are London publishers so in thrall to such gothic manifestations of modern Ireland that beautiful prose, masking the heightened horrors of poverty, stunted relationships and personal mis-development, is the lucrative ore they mine from Ireland's best writers?

Some one has to die, as the story plays through its run of violence and madness. There is always sacrifice; blood spilled for the good of further living, yet no sanity is achieved. By the end, Melody Shee invokes 'love of the perfect kind, the kind that exists above all earthly things', in a form of religious super-humanism.

The pregnancy neatly runs forty weeks. For all the raging and ranting the work feels manicured. Perhaps this is the achievement Donal Ryan seeks. No doubt there will be more good work, but this reader would like to see it looser and hear the voices stepping closer to characters than to writers. A challenge, always. It's not that you know the ending. It's just that the ending has the neatness of fable, rather than the raggedness of lived art. That such work can be considered redemptive makes it a telling parable of our times, times of alienation, aloneness, self-absorption, violence and sketchy hope.

All We Shall Know; Donal Ryan, Doubleday/Transworld, London, 2016

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