A promising first novel that’s full of contrasts

GHOST Moth, the first novel by actress Michèle Forbes, is a novel of contrasts.

Katherine Bedford, is a middle-aged mother of four in suburban Belfast when it opens in August 1969. The city is about to erupt into sectarian violence that will affect even the comfortable, largely Protestant suburb where the Catholic Bedford family live.

Then the story flashes back to August 1949, when Katherine is starring in an amateur production of Carmen in an optimistic post-war Belfast, where young lovers take moonlit walks along the River Lagan and share pots of tea in brightly-lit city centre tea rooms.

The young Katherine is about to become engaged to dull, reliable George, when she meets a romantic but enigmatic tailor, Tom. In spite of having been swept off her feet and seduced by Tom, she accepts George’s engagement ring, and will apparently go ahead with the marriage, even though Tom is the man who makes her feel alive.

The two stories are told in parallel sections, each of which features a detailed evocation of Belfast at that time. Forbes is at her best when describing domestic scenes: the interior of the packed family car, heading to and from the beach on a hot August day in the opening section brilliantly combines dialogue and description to evoke the experience.

‘That was in the olden days, wasn’t it, Mummy?’ asks nine-year-old Elsa when her mother’s past as a singer is mentioned.

George who is a part-time fireman, is a worried first-hand witness of the increasing tension in the city. Meanwhile, Katherine, cocooned in her domestic world, organises a back garden summer fair for the children.

As the tension builds in 1969 Belfast, the story of Katherine’s entanglement with Tom in 1949 Belfast is revealed in alternate sections. It is an ambitious scheme, and all too soon the inadequacy of Forbes’ writing becomes evident.

Attempts at stream of consciousness disintegrate into incoherence, while descriptions of happier times tend to sentimentality. The use of metaphor — the encounter with a seal in the opening section, the ghost moths of the title, the dead bees that greet Elsa’s birth — is repetitive and overwrought, and sits uneasily with the realism of the rest. Those reading the novel for its story will be impatient with its literary ambitions, while those seeking literary fiction will be disappointed at its sentimentality.

Ghost Moth comes garlanded with praise from a veritable who’s who of Irish writers: John Banville, Roddy Doyle, Anne Enright, and Sebastian Barry. This is very generous of them, but perhaps raises unrealistic expectations. A firm editorial hand could have made a huge difference. Instead it got an editor who thinks that “run amok” is spelt “run amuck”. This is a promising first novel, containing some very good writing alongside some beginner’s errors of judgement.