Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way by Elaine Feeney review – a satisfying tale of memory and place

The Guardian

a day ago

Elaine Feeney's third novel, following the success of her prize-winning debut As You Were and the Booker-longlisted How to Build a Boat, focuses on Claire O'Connor, a woman who has moved from London back to Athenry in the west of Ireland in the wake of her mother's death. Her new life is disturbed when she finds her ex-partner Tom has moved in down the road. Or rather, that's one thread in a story that becomes steadily more interesting than this simple set-up from the romance novelist's playbook, as layers of family memory and trauma build up to form a portrait of the wider O'Connor family: all their history, the way it has shaped them and the traces it has left on the places around.
Claire shows herself to be unusually attuned to the history of her home place, telling stories about nearby Thoor Ballylee, where Yeats lived; Lady Gregory's Coole Park; the place where Cromwell used to stable his horses. At first it seems a bit forced, a writer shoehorning in their research. But the tic begins to make sense as the marks of the past on Claire's family are revealed; slowly, one realises that the enumeration of these histories is crucial to the way the O'Connors live. Central to this gradual discovery is Feeney's use of stories-within-the-story; the novel is enlivened by a series of smaller, contained memories from Claire's childhood, and tales reaching back a century to the time when the O'Connors first lived in the family home.
These are fascinating interludes breaking up the main plot, which is the slow and not very complex thawing of Claire's relationship with Tom, a recovery that seems to allow her to complete her cycle of grieving for her parents. In these shorter stories, which are like currants in the cake, we get access to the depths of her family's life: heartbreaking glimpses of her father's attempt to sell a horse to the queen of England's breeders, and of the appalling violence visited on the family by the Black and Tans. These are the kinds of memories that can go on to define whole lives, and illuminate the more humdrum present Claire is living in.
It slowly emerges that really, this novel tells the story of a house. Feeney has created a brilliant metaphor in the O'Connor family home, a modern bungalow with the old farmhouse looming behind it. Like the fairy tree at the bottom of the farm, the family have come to believe they can never pull the old house down, lest it bring them bad luck; but this looming cavern of memory seems to offer very little access to past happiness, only past pain. By the end of Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way, the novel has become a story about what a family should do with its past. It's a hugely satisfying, sophisticated structure, and the apparent thinness of Claire and Tom's story ceases to matter, because it's only the first layer of a more complex work.
Aspects of the novel are less successful. Claire finds herself drawn into the world of tradwives, and begins taking lifestyle tips from an Instagram account run by one of these women. This dalliance with what are essentially hard-right politics isn't particularly well ironised, and Claire seems to simply snap out of it. She realises there is no lost perfect time, only different hardship; but the discovery isn't given enough room to make sense, so all the pages of baking end up seeming like a fever dream that's never quite explained. Feeney is also capable of writing very, very unsuccessful dialogue: 'You're not dragging me into your murky confusion, Claire.' 'I forget sometimes.' 'Forget what?' 'All the people I've met – since.' 'Since?' 'Us.' This can make the characters sound a bit thick, which they manifestly aren't. However, the novel's baggy, complex, unfolding structure offers rich rewards.
Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way by Elaine Feeney is published by Harvill Secker (£16.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.