Book review: Empathetic writing shines through in engaging debut

Framed between two referenda, Niamh Mulvey’s debut novel continues her ideas around mother and daughter relationships amid the abortion debate first referenced in her debut short story collection

Author Niamh Mulvey Book: 'Hearts and Bones' Picture: Kate Elliott

• The Amendments
• Niamh Mulvey 
• Picador £14.99

Niamh Mulvey’s debut collection, Heart & Bones, released in 2022, concerned relationships between mother and daughter, the distance between London and Dublin, pregnancy amid the abortion debate, all under the subtitle of love songs for late youth.

All are ideas that Mulvey continues in her debut novel, The Amendments.

As the title suggests, the story is bookended by two referenda, when the Eighth Amendment was introduced in 1982 and when it was repealed nearly 40 years later. Three generations of women, three different experiences of women’s rights, religion, and love pulling at their various sleeves, are detailed in the interweaving timelines.

There’s Nell, who is about to have a baby with her partner Adrienne. That their story begins in a therapist’s room in London in January 2018 suggests all is not quite right: If Adrienne, pregnant with their baby, finds out the full extent of Nell’s not wanting, then she will leave, Nell fears.

From there we dive back to Ireland in 1998, and Nell’s first days at the convent — it was not a boarding school, but it felt like one. 

As with any young, wide-eyed teenager looking for direction, Nell finds something in a movement called La Obra de los Hogarenos — the Works of the Homemakers. It was Catholic (at a time when Catholicism was feeling the push and sway of scandals at home and abroad) even if it didn’t quite feel like it was. There, Nell meets Martina, a guide who becomes a confidante.

And then it is back to 1982, and Nell’s mother Dolores trying to find her feet in Dublin, where she’s moved from rural Ireland to do a secretarial course, pushing herself, getting away from her presumed path at home of working in the family pub. 

While behind the counter, Dolores had seen the way of women, how they felt too much — she saw it in the way some of the older women would drink at the bar, sodden and beleaguered and full of incomprehensible muttering. Not her. In the big city, Dolores meets Annie, who everyone calls a women’s libber, and who is advocating for abortion in the upcoming referendum.

Mulvey is painterly in revealing her characters. Annie is too pushy, too ‘college’, to understand why the ordinary women, the likes of Dolores’ mother, for example, might have a problem with the amendment. Annie doesn’t understand the delicate, reserved nature of things in early 1980s Ireland. 

But Annie does open Dolores’ eyes, like she opens her door to make use of her flat when she isn’t there, like she laughs along at Dolores when she sings an Irish song at a party in the UK.

Relationships, like experiences, echo through the generations. For Annie, read Pilar, who Nell gets close to on a retreat with the Hogarenos movement; Nell didn’t understand until later that Pilar thought she was poor.

Back and forth the action jumps, revealing a little more about Dolores, Annie, and eventually Martina each time, seeing how similar they are, how supposed friends in their lives have shaped them and mothers have influenced them, for better or ill. 

Budding relationships have the feel of a YA book while the few men in the story, like Dolores’ husband Liam, feel like a cliche. “Women’s libbers are always angry,” he tells her in the early ’80s, while some 20 years later, he’s suggesting they invest in property abroad.

By the time he loses his job during the crash, it feels like Liam has ticked off every truism of Ireland at its excessive worst.

Mulvey tries to pack a lot into this story, with tragedy and darkness along the way, too. It’s perhaps too much, but her direct, empathetic writing shines through, and her descriptions of character are full of flourish. An engaging debut novel.