Book Review: Noel O'Regan's debut novel touches on mortality and solidarity
Author of 'Though the Bodies Fall' Noel O’Regan
- Though the Bodies Fall
- Noel O’Regan
- Granta, £12.99
This debut novel from Kerry-raised author Noel O’Regan is impressive with its haunting quality, evocative prose and rather strange premise that offers plenty of potential for drama and reflection. The protagonist, Micheál Burns, lives alone in his family’s bungalow at the end of Kerry Head. A bleak but picturesque location, the cliffs have an ominous presence. For generations, they have been a suicide black spot.
Micheál’s mother, Aideen, took it upon herself to save the lost souls that came to the precipice, euphemistically referring to them as ‘visitors.’ For Aideen, talking down the suicidal, without ever judging them, was her spiritual duty. She saw it as God’s work and believed she was fated to do it. She imposed this duty on her children, exposing them to an ugly reality at a young age.
Micheál, having “failed spectacularly at life” had at least a purpose in his mission to continue his mother’s work. (His father died prematurely from a hereditary heart condition.) The novel switches between the past and the present, sustaining the reader’s interest with family history and the current struggles of Micheál, particularly in relation to his two younger sisters, Áine and Saoirse.
The sisters tell Micheál that they want to sell the land. They need the money and having both been corralled into soul-saving by their late mother, of whom they have negative memories, Áine and Saoirse can afford to be unsentimental about their former abode and the surrounding area.
Micheál has a stark choice; he must choose between his siblings and the so-called visitors, a future or the past. But Micheál’s motives for wishing to remain in the family home doing the salvation work, are not necessarily pure. As Nadine, his ex-wife (who left him very soon after they moved from Limerick to the Kerry bungalow) said to him, he wasn’t helping the visitors but hiding himself in them, using them as a means to escape the world.
Áine tells her brother that he is turning into their mother with his twisted sense of duty, triggered perhaps by something other than love of his fellow man. Micheál reflects that his feelings about his mother are not even clear. He carries resentment towards her, near-hatred and hurt that she made him, from the age of twelve, save the suicidal.
But he also has love towards his mother and a sense of solidarity. He can convince himself that “certain sacrifices are necessary”. You could say that Micheál sacrificed Nadine once she learned of her husband’s work on the headland. While he is a flawed character, a sympathetic view of Micheál is possible. He is, after all, his mother’s son. When his uncle Dinny comes to see him, Micheál asks him a lot of questions about his mother who was Dinny’s sister. What stays with Micheál about Aideen is not her kindness but an image that Dinny paints as he recalls the time she pulverised a neighbour’s snowman as a young girl.
What Micheál fails to understand is why Aideen decided to give all the love she had to the visitors rather than her children. And that is something this reviewer grappled with. Although this is a fine novel, the mother figure is somewhat elusive, difficult to grasp, not fully credible. She doesn’t come across as a religious zealot although she invokes God to justify her life’s work. When Micheál was a kid, Aideen told him the work she has taken on is tough. However, her bewildered son felt “like a goalie” in this mission to save as many souls as possible. It is a mystery as to why Aideen sacrificed her children for strangers.
