First Thoughts: An impressive book by Allie Murray
Padbury is a fictional place that will be recognisable by its nature to anyone who has spent a significant stretch of time in a closeknit community setting, a place where every action, no matter how covert, is seen by someone, where the background noise is always gossip, where feuds tend to fester across generations and where surfaces present only a small part of the true picture.
The novel centres mainly around a few families, and follows a number of entangled subplots. Three sisters, Grace, Patti, and Jo, a closet alcoholic, try to deal with their snobbish mother, Alma, and the news that the family home is to be left to their wastrel brother, James.
No one is prepared for the announcement of their cousin Melanie’s engagement to Frank, an arrogant type who’d once dallied with Patti and then cruelly broke her heart. And they are even less prepared for the sudden death of their father.
James, meanwhile, has been spending his nights metal detecting and excavating the large garden behind the family home, in search of stolen ancestral treasure.
The sisters are part of a book club that also includes Jane, whose husband, Martin, the local garda, is mired in health and financial issues. And another book club member, Beryl, has problems of her own. She and her out-of-work husband, Tommy, have been trying for years to adopt a child, and are finally about to have their dream come through. The marriage, though, has grown stale, and she is involved in a long-time affair with a neighbour, Doug Nyhan.
Doug and his gruff brother, Beet (who has secretly also held a long-burning flame for Beryl), are a couple of bachelors still struggling to deal with the fact that their father had long ago abandoned them without a word of explanation. But it seems that Jolly Jane, who runs a small café in the village, might know something about it.
Handling such a large cast of characters, especially in a novel of less than 200 pages, is a challenge, but the author mostly manages to pull it off.
Not every cast member is as developed, or as necessary to the storyline, as they might be, and a couple tend to lean in the direction of stereotype. Yet there’s a notable freshness about the storytelling, and the author’s prose style is crisp, tight and wonderfully unobtrusive, which sets the focus where it properly belongs: on the tangled tale being spun.
All things considered, Bountiful is a thoroughly impressive début offering from a writer whose future work is worth anticipating.
