Mouthing Author : Orla Mackey ISBN-13 : 978-0241617298 Publisher : Hamish Hamilton Guideline Price : £14.99 Orla Mackey’s resonant and multifaceted debut novel might best be thought of as a patchwork quilt. You know the type: well-worn, much-loved, repaired several times over (and often with bits and pieces of a curious provenance); it is a comfortable, familiar thing of the kind your grandmother might have made, one which has been passed down through the generations.
Mouthing, and for that matter the village which is its setting, reflects that kind of richness. A single story cannot account for all they represent. Everyone here has a tale to tell and, through Mackey’s acerbic characterisation, everyone gets their turn to weigh in on funerals and weddings, on hurling matches and on affairs.
The village is a recognisable place, one that runs on gossip and on a delicious and barely disguised Schadenfreude. It is, in that sense, a rural Irish community like any other. The meat of the novel is thus the recognisable world of country work.
Of mending gaps in ditches and cleaning trenches. Of emigration and return. There is a pub and there is a priest.
There are secrets and lies. It is by turns funny, horrifying, and all too real. The epigraph may come from Brendan Kennelly , but the presiding literary deity here is arguably Patrick Kavanagh who, donning the guise of Homer, declared: “I made the Iliad from such / a local row.
” This kind of material could easily become stand.
