It’s almost a year until my second novel, Underneath, is published. As it starts with looking around a house, I had it in mind when I posted my guest prompt over at the Carrot Ranch recently. What I didn’t realise at the time was that this would herald a theme cutting across much of my reading and reviews, from Nolan’s work on a building site in Journeyman, to an updated Wildfell in The Woman Who Ran, to the isolated manor house in The Sacred Combe, a large house in Nigeria in This House is not For Sale, a farmhouse in upstate New York which has been bought on the cheap in All Things Cease to Appear and an entire street in Prosperity Drive. Now I’m adding to that list with a novel about a former show house on an unfinished Irish housing estate from which, one by one, all four members of a family disappear and another about the strange children who come to live in an isolated mansion.
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Helen, her twin sister Martina, her partner Paul and their unnamed daughter return to Ireland and rent a property on a building site, where work has stopped, at the beginning of a long hot summer. The only other occupied house becomes empty when the husband dies and the wife moves in with her daughter. Then the night watchman, whom Martina used to visit in his caravan, is withdrawn and the site owner, who’s been promising new neighbours for weeks, stops visiting. When Helen disappears, her photo is posted in shop windows, but the police have no leads. Martina stops work to sunbathe with her twelve-year-old niece and collect bottled water from the supermarket when the supply to the house is cut off. When Martina also vanishes, Paul and his daughter sleep at night in the stifling attic, afraid of the mysterious noises they hear across the site.
Then the daughter, who’s taken her mother’s name, comes banging on the door of the local priest, saying her father has gone. The police duly arrive to investigate, but leave young Helen at the priest’s house over the weekend. When she can’t be found, the finger of suspicion, with a nod to the events portrayed in A History of Loneliness, understandably falls on him.
Conor O’Callaghan’s debut novel is disturbing in the way that a nightmare is disturbing: there’s a veritable air of menace but, without a coherent narrative, impossible to explain and so fades away on exposure to the real world. Thanks to Transworld for my review copy.
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Grossly disfigured in late adolescence (reminding me of Sean in Wolf in White Van), Morgan rarely leaves the large country house built and furnished by his exiled grandfather. One day, Engel, his housekeeper, discovers a baby left on the steps by the back door. Soon more children arrive, more than he can count, their presence in the house both a source of joy (especially as they show no fear of his grotesque appearance) and vaguely unsettling. What makes them at times so typically childlike, at others fiercely mature? Where do they go when the house descends into an eerie quietness? From where does David, the eldest, acquire his evident authority and is Morgan right to trust his advice?
Soon the local physician Dr Crane takes up residence in the house, the nearest to a friend Morgan has ever had. Like Samuel Browne, the volunteer archivist in The Sacred Combe, the doctor becomes absorbed in exploring the mansion’s library, and its attics too. The children also, once they learn to read and write, are on a quest to uncover the secrets the building holds.
An atmospheric and distorted fairytale, this is another novel where I struggled to find the meaning under the surface. I thought perhaps the house might be a representation of Morgan’s psyche, and the numerous children split-off fragments of his unacknowledged and darker desires (p99):
He imagined himself the dirty secret at the heart of the world, the overlooked madwoman raving in the attic of a house that occupied everything there was, each brick and pane and board, the wondering prince in the hair-filled mask of iron he had dreamt of as a boy and never been able to forget.
This reading seems supported by the discovery of two extremely lifelike wax models: one of a heavily pregnant woman; the other man’s head with removable scalp and skull through which one might examine the human brain.
But the focus turns to the question of the source of Morgan’s wealth and the exact business of the family factory now run by a sister he never sees. The Children’s Home becomes a story of human cruelty, of the corruption of innocence in pursuit of profit, evoking the evil of the Holocaust. As the children say, in their first writing exercise (p106):
I AM ONLY A CHILD BUT ALREADY I HAVE UNDERSTOOD THE WICKEDNESS OF THE WORLD.
A disturbing and thought-provoking novel, and short enough to take a risk on if you’re not sure you’d like it. Thanks to Aardvark Bureau for my review copy.
Then the daughter, who’s taken her mother’s name, comes banging on the door of the local priest, saying her father has gone. The police duly arrive to investigate, but leave young Helen at the priest’s house over the weekend. When she can’t be found, the finger of suspicion, with a nod to the events portrayed in A History of Loneliness, understandably falls on him.
Conor O’Callaghan’s debut novel is disturbing in the way that a nightmare is disturbing: there’s a veritable air of menace but, without a coherent narrative, impossible to explain and so fades away on exposure to the real world. Thanks to Transworld for my review copy.
############################################################
Grossly disfigured in late adolescence (reminding me of Sean in Wolf in White Van), Morgan rarely leaves the large country house built and furnished by his exiled grandfather. One day, Engel, his housekeeper, discovers a baby left on the steps by the back door. Soon more children arrive, more than he can count, their presence in the house both a source of joy (especially as they show no fear of his grotesque appearance) and vaguely unsettling. What makes them at times so typically childlike, at others fiercely mature? Where do they go when the house descends into an eerie quietness? From where does David, the eldest, acquire his evident authority and is Morgan right to trust his advice?
Soon the local physician Dr Crane takes up residence in the house, the nearest to a friend Morgan has ever had. Like Samuel Browne, the volunteer archivist in The Sacred Combe, the doctor becomes absorbed in exploring the mansion’s library, and its attics too. The children also, once they learn to read and write, are on a quest to uncover the secrets the building holds.
An atmospheric and distorted fairytale, this is another novel where I struggled to find the meaning under the surface. I thought perhaps the house might be a representation of Morgan’s psyche, and the numerous children split-off fragments of his unacknowledged and darker desires (p99):
He imagined himself the dirty secret at the heart of the world, the overlooked madwoman raving in the attic of a house that occupied everything there was, each brick and pane and board, the wondering prince in the hair-filled mask of iron he had dreamt of as a boy and never been able to forget.
This reading seems supported by the discovery of two extremely lifelike wax models: one of a heavily pregnant woman; the other man’s head with removable scalp and skull through which one might examine the human brain.
But the focus turns to the question of the source of Morgan’s wealth and the exact business of the family factory now run by a sister he never sees. The Children’s Home becomes a story of human cruelty, of the corruption of innocence in pursuit of profit, evoking the evil of the Holocaust. As the children say, in their first writing exercise (p106):
I AM ONLY A CHILD BUT ALREADY I HAVE UNDERSTOOD THE WICKEDNESS OF THE WORLD.
A disturbing and thought-provoking novel, and short enough to take a risk on if you’re not sure you’d like it. Thanks to Aardvark Bureau for my review copy.
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