Johnston shows her worth as one of Ireland’s most compelling voices

Her novels display a surface smallness that belies their immense depths. She is a storyteller of truth and its consequences, and her books are deep and worthwhile considerations of the human condition

Annie Ross is a young woman treading water. Born into a very wealthy household, she fled, at the youngest possible age, following her mother’s passing, in order to escape the grip of her father, a cold, controlling and overbearing man, and has settled in London where she ekes out a meagre living working in a bookshop.

It is neither an idyllic life nor a bad one. Fleeing had been less about a yearning for freedom than a necessity for survival. She is a strong, stubborn, independent type, but possessed of a certain disconnection, and doesn’t really involve herself in the world, or with others. The past looms large for her, but in a way too enormous to acknowledge. Denial makes for an easier existence.

It takes a death to draw her home, for the first time in more than 10 years. Her father, it seems, had been secretly ill for some time, but they’d not been close. Some years earlier, against her wishes, he had sent her off to school in England, determined that she would follow him into the business he’d worked so hard and so ably to develop, the business of high finance, making money from money. But she had more in common with him than either of them had anticipated: a stubborn, single-minded streak that gave her the strength to run.

Her love was for books, and her long-term ambition, she decided, was to own a small bookshop so that she could horde her treasure and become intimate with the millions of pages of secrets. News of his death saddens her, but only in a casual way. In truth, though she continues to think of him as Dada, she feels little for him. Yet she also feels a sense of duty.

Dealing with her stepmother Miriam, with whom she’d never been close, is a chore to be barely tolerated, but at least proves a fleeting inconvenience. Miriam is jetting out to Monte Carlo with the money. The house, a rambling manor set in 10 acres of beautiful, melancholy Wicklow countryside, though still within touching-distance of Dublin, has been left to Annie. And Annie’s plan is to sell so that she can begin to make her own dream a reality.

But what she discovers in that abandoned and long-despised home is a mystery she’d never even suspected, one that revolves largely around her mother, Jude, a fey creature with a musical heart, a drink problem and an irreparably broken soul, and which speaks of desolation and almost unutterable tragedy.

As the house is put up for sale, and Annie scouts the neighbouring villages for a small, affordable premises that will provide a suitable home for her bookish ambitions, the past starts to reveal itself in fragments, through slowly awakening memories and through the words of an elderly neighbour, Miss Dundas, and the old woman’s nephew, Kevin, a man in his mid-forties who has been working in a part-time capacity as caretaker at the Ross place.

Kevin’s presence startles her upon first arrival, but his pushy brand of kindness gains him quick ground with her. Bit by bit, he reveals truths about her mother, his first and only love, the woman he’d fallen headlong for at 16. He knows things, more — it transpires — than anyone else, but he still doesn’t know everything.

His first stunning revelation is that Jude’s death was by suicide, but that is only the beginning. Over the four-year run of their frenzied affair, until things reached breaking point, he had been both a crutch for, and a cause of, her unhappiness and sense of hopeless entrapment.

The problem, as proven by the stack of diaries that Annie discovers in her father’s study, is that some secrets simply can’t remain hidden, no matter how deeply they might be buried. And guilt and innocence are never simply black and white issues. Nobody is everything they seem to be.

The novel’s title is drawn from a children’s nursery rhyme, “Sing a song of sixpence, a pocket full of rye...” and this echoes throughout the book, pulling Annie constantly back to her childhood. Her father, ‘the king, in his counting house, counting out his money’; her mother, ‘the queen, in the parlour, eating bread and honey’, or, in her case, feasting on gin. And it soon becomes clear that money cannot buy love and that privilege doesn’t necessarily equal happiness.

Since stepping onto the literary scene more than 40 years ago, Jennifer Johnston has held a deserved status as one of Ireland’s most compelling voices.

Her novels display a surface smallness that belies their immense depths, the finely hewn prose keeping the deception of apparent simplicity with sentences that knit together like a musical score, pitch-perfect and rich with carefully selected silent notes. More than anything, she is a storyteller of truth and its consequences, and her books are deep and worthwhile considerations of the human condition.

A Sixpenny Song is the 16th novel in a career that has already thrown up a plethora of touchstone works: her acclaimed début, The Captains and the Kings, merely hinted at what lay ahead. Shadows on our Skin was short-listed for the Booker Prize in 1977.

Two years later, The Old Jest earned her the coveted Whitbread Award. How Many Miles To Babylon?, the complex story of a First World War-era friendship, and generally acknowledged as her masterpiece, still astonishes after so many decades and remains essential reading for entire generations of Irish teens. And these are only a few of the peaks in what has been a truly admirable career.

Presented largely in dialogue that plays out between beautifully unforced characters, A Sixpenny Song is a truly moving novel evidencing beyond all reasonable doubt, if any such proof were required, not only that the fire has yet to burn out but that Miss Johnston, at 83 years old, remains at the very top of her game.