Some months ago Reading Matters posted the names of books shortlisted for the Kerry Group Novel of the year award. This is the third one of that list I have read. A young Irish woman working on costumes for a theatre production in London tells her story set over a short period in 2002.
Mairéad has made her way to a job in London. While she worked to escape her life in Ireland, she misses it too. She escapes the hard work for a few moments on the steel platform five stories high. “I raised my face to the sun and thought about being at home, by the ocean. The gulls I heard were not ripping open bin bags, they were fishing in the channel, and wild primroses were growing along the side of the road.” Her job involved two four-hour shifts each day and she was surprised to hear a colleague describing their boss Margaret as protecting them from the producer who required other members of the company to sign an NDA. It was a grim existence and she was not finding much joy in her work. She spoke of the kindness of her landlord, a Muslim man and his wife.
She recalled on the day she arrived in London she went in search of Big Ben. The first statue she saw was of Oliver Cromwell, sending her into a rage. She learned in primary school that “his name went hand in glove with siege, massacre and burning us alive. The concept of building a statue to him was not within my understanding.” Her colleagues seemed to have no knowledge of the Irish Famine in the 1840s. While she enjoyed most of them, they did not share her reality.
One night she passed out at home, hitting her head and giving herself a black eye. A roommate found her and she was taken to the hospital. When she didn’t turn up for work the next day, Margaret managed to find her to tell her bluntly that her grandmother had died. With her return to Ireland, the book seemed to come to life. While her life in London was hard and grim, the family fury she encountered at home was at a different level. She warded off a blow her father intended to give her, then her mother and father shrieked at each other endlessly.
When she returned to London, she was shown attention and warmth after her loss and she felt she was in a kind community. At a social event after the play that night, she was emboldened to respond to an insult from the producer. Standing up against her father had made her unwilling to be badly treated by others. Her father called her the next day to tell her that her mother had changed the locks and asked if she had known about it. She told him that yelling at her would not fix his problem with her mother. Then she learned she was fired from her job and Margaret gave her contact information for staff in other theatres. The response when she called one was, “Welcome to the survivors’ group.”
This description of the events at the end of the book is artless on my part, but I found it helps me think about the author’s direction. The end did make the book work for me; Mairéad and Dervla pushed back against oppressors and found support.
Elaine Garvey, The Wardrobe Department, Canongate Books, 2025, 240 pages (I read the kindle version). Not available in the public library.