HEART, BE AT PEACE, by Donal Ryan
Who can keep up with Ireland’s stellar writers? It’s like playing Whac-a-Mole! Donal Ryan’s slim, shape-shifting “Heart, Be at Peace” is a wonder: 21 first-person vignettes that portray a Tipperary parish’s struggles to leave behind a decade of economic woes. More than money is on the line.
A stag party in Amsterdam. An abducted child returned safely. A mysterious murder years in the past. A drug cartel skulking amid the shadows. These are among the few fixed points in the novel, as Ryan dribbles out his noirish tale in pieces that gradually come together. Bobby and Triona Mahon are raising their children in what passes for affluence in Nenagh; he owns a construction business and employs a crew while fretting over the parish’s slow recovery from a recession. He’s a thoughtful family man trying to fly right, but will he escape the gravity of male rage?
A retired detective notes the couple’s heroic efforts: “It was Bobby who gave himself the task of building back up the whole village, giving every one of them lads a job again. Himself and the wife went from door to door, to bank and credit union and every kind of a back-street moneylender and shyster to get started again, and by God did they get started.”
The Mahons reside in a mansion coveted by their friends, the Shanahans: Seanie, a middle-aged screw-up, and his social-climbing spouse, Réaltín. Their son, Dylan, was snatched from his day care years earlier and rescued, his bumbling kidnappers imprisoned and eventually paroled.
“Heart, Be at Peace” springs into motion with a photo that Seanie took of Bobby emerging from an Amsterdam brothel; Bobby hasn’t been unfaithful, yet Réaltín shares the image across Nenagh. The cartel closes in, undermining Bobby’s gains. Betrayals beget betrayals as the author leads us through a maze of entwined lives.
Ryan’s sentences gleam, peeling the calloused skin of machismo to expose the vulnerabilities of his men, cutting against our expectations. Seanie’s a louse — perhaps worse — until he speaks for himself in a slang that smacks of stout and salt breezes: “It’s like I’m split in two, light and dark. Most of the time the two sides can mingle so I’m just kind of stable, half normal,” he says. “I can act the bollix, slag away, take a slagging … I can give a hand out at the hurling with the coaching here and there, and Dylan doesn’t even get embarrassed.” His goodness, buried deep within, isn’t less real simply because it’s buried.
Ryan’s women also grapple with what it means to be good. Lily, an elderly recluse, prefers pagan rituals to Catholic pieties: “I was a witch by training and a whore by inclination.” Her granddaughter, Millicent, falls for Nenagh’s bad boy, the sadistic Augie Penrose. Mags, a lesbian engineer, recalls her deceased father, “a memory … delivered in a parcel of morning air, so vivid and stark that every intervening moment sloughed away and I was dragged suddenly and violently by the elastic tether that joined me to my 6-year-old self, so that I could feel his hand in mine.”
Does the sheer number of characters dilute this short novel’s impact? Ryan winks to his own technique in a chapter narrated by an inmate who dreams of becoming a writer: “I composed a series of monologues. I gave each speaker a unique voice. … And when I had the language leashed, the characters were suddenly beyond my control. They were crazy! The things they said and did. The wild joy I felt. The rightness of it all.” “Heart, Be at Peace” moves with the lightness and felicity of a story collection, sifting relationships built on sand, pummeled by tides of human folly.
HEART, BE AT PEACE | By Donal Ryan | Viking | 196 pp. | $28
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