Despite its door-stopping proportions I couldn’t resist Catherine Airey’s much trumpeted debut with its promise of an involving tale of two Irish sisters, one of whom emigrates to New York to take up an art school scholarship ticking two of my literary boxes. Máire and Rósín’s stories span decades beginning in the 1970s when they’re growing up in an Irish village not far from the house which one will paint and the other will eventually live in, making it the setting for a choose-your-own-adventure computer video game.
I was at a time in my life where I got to thinking more about people’s choices – how everything would be different if just the slightest decision changed.
Máire and Rósín have a thorny relationship: Máire’s volatility made worse by the discovery of her father’s body, prematurely dead after a heart attack, while Rósín tries to placate her, disappearing into the background. Fascinated by the house that was once a boarding school, the sisters make up stories about its haunting, thrilling and terrorising their schoolmates. With their mother refusing to leave her bed or speak after their father’s death, the sisters raise themselves, Máire taking up with Michael, also a misfit in rural ‘70s Ireland with his racial heritage. When the group of women who’ve taken up residence in what’s come to be known as the Screamers’ house advertise for an artist in residence, Michael and Rósín secretly enter some of Máire’s drawings setting in train a series of events which will reverberate through several generations, resulting in an estrangement between the sisters. It’s the first of many secrets, some of which will be revealed some not, the biggest left to chance.
There were the things you presented to people – your stories. Then there were the things you never confessed – your secrets. That was how we existed, how we knew ourselves at all.
Airey’s long, intricately plotted novel is a luxurious, immersive read, fitting neatly together like a jigsaw. It opens in 2001 with Máire’s daughter before winding back to Rósín in the ‘70s and ending with Máire’s granddaughter in 2023 after passing the narrative baton back and forth. Each section is prefaced with a scenario from Scream School, the computer video game which Rósín wrote based on the stories she and her sister wove around the house that fascinated them. Airey smoothly unfolds this complicated, puzzle of a story, pieces of which click satisfyingly into place, largely through the distinctive voices of its female characters, exploring a multitude of themes along the way. To say more about the plot would be to ruin it. There’s a coincidence that may irritate some, but I was so immersed by then that I was more than happy to continue the ride. An enjoyable debut, deserving of all the brouhaha, perfect for long winter evenings.
Viking London 9780241675182 480 pages Hardback (read via NetGalley)
