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BEWARE: SPOILER ALERT

Strange Flowers is a recent release from Irish writer Donal Ryan. I’ve previously read The Spinning Heart (2012); The Thing About December (2014); and From a Low and Quiet Sea (2018) all of which deal one way or another with cultural change in Ireland.  In a setting that begins with the 1970s, Strange Flowers explores the arrival of a black man from London looking for his Irish wife in a small, insular village, and the catalyst for these events is a #MeToo moment for a young woman whose emerging sexuality is not acceptable within the rigidities of Catholic Ireland.  None of this is known when the book begins, so there are spoilers in this review.

Moll refuses to live life with the passivity of her parents. When the book opens, she has gone, left for a destination unknown, and for reasons not explained.  She does not contact her parents for five years, leaving them in a kind of abyss, mourning the loss of their only child without knowing what has actually happened or even if she is alive or dead.  The irony is that the daily routines of Catholicism offer them some kind of solace, when it is, in part, the strictures of the church that impel Moll’s flight, and cause her to make choices that are not ever really right for her.

The other reason for her flight is social.  Her parents, Kit and Paddy Gladney, are tenant farmers, beholden to their wealthy neighbours for their home and financial security, such as it is.  The Jackmans own the farm and the house, and they are at the top of the social hierarchy in the village.  For people in this village of Knockagowny in County Tipperary, it has always been that way.  So it comes as no surprise that Lucas Jackman has a sense of entitlement over all that he surveys.  For Moll to take the kind of action that she’s entitled to make when she’s been assaulted, would ruin her parents’ livelihood and have them turned out of their home.  Given the choice, her loving parents would have done anything and lost everything to protect her, but that’s not the choice that Moll makes.

The story is related into the next generation, from different narrative voices.  The author’s dilemma is obvious: the narrative is written from perspectives (of race, gender, sexuality) necessarily different from his own.  Some would say he ought not appropriate these perspectives, or if he does, that his characters’ voices and experiences are not authentic, or that his representations of diversity are at best naive or idealistic.

But how, then, could he or anybody else, write a story of this transitional period in Irish life? Of an inter-racial marriage, and the reaction of both sets of parents at a time when that was so rare? Or the story of the first Black arrival in an insular, monocultural, monoracial microcosm of society — a place too small to ignore his presence but so committed to the sanctity of marriage that through mere proximity they mostly eventually overcame their prejudice though it surfaced again from time to time? Or the story of the mistakes made by a young woman brought up in ignorance of sexuality other than the heterosexual resolutely married-for-life norm?

Strange Flowers has its flaws, but it represents a microcosm of society fifty years ago, when change was bursting into settled ways of doing things and upending any sense of certainty about everyday life.

…Paddy looked up into his wife’s face and saw there, for the first time since the early days of Moll’s disappearance, an expression of perfect bewilderment, and terrible fear, and terrible tiredness, a hunted look: she was an old woman. (p.53)

Paddy sets off to meet the stranger that his daughter has married…

… and he wondered at how life could be a certain way one minute and a different way altogether the next with no effort at all from the person whose life it was.  For a man to do his duty now was not enough, it seemed.  To live a Christian life, observing all the obligations that entailed, doing his work and minding his wife and daughter and saying his prayers and going to Mass and the odd hurling match. Why had these chaotic things been visited on a man so inclined to peacefulness and contentment? A daughter turned unaccountably to flight and madness and this visitation from a dark stranger.  It was like something out of a book, one of those affronting ones that were banned for being a danger to the morals and mortal souls of decent people. (p.54)

Alexander Elmwood’s courage in following his heart means a painful adjustment to life in Ireland:

But here he had no comrade, no family, no Jamaican café, no Sunday school or backroom church, no street of his own people, no Syd swaggering beside him, chest out, head high.  His blackness here was as remarkable as his son’s whiteness had been in Notting Hill, and all the pain of difference now was his, and this was how it had to be.  Everywhere people stared.  He pretended to be oblivious but in truth he was always aware of the looking, of the whispered conjecture, of the jokes he knew were being made at his expense, and at the expense of Moll and Paddy and Kit and Joshua, and even of the Jackmans.  For the first while he enjoyed his strange celebrity.  People talked behind their hands to each other, looked him up and down and then looked away, then looked back again when they thought he couldn’t see them looking.  (p.97)

Ryan doesn’t labour this point.  Starting with Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1956, see my review) and Andrea Levy’s Small Island (2004) there is now a plethora of contemporary novels exposing racism, explicit and casual, and only readers who’ve failed to pay attention can’t read between the lines to imagine the kind of racism experienced by Alexander. Ryan’s novel is concerned with how a man deals with this when the love of his life lives in such a place and he makes a choice to stay there.  And he contrasts the way that Alexander’s choice can’t be hidden, while Moll’s relationship with another woman can avoid the stigma by remaining covert, but that’s not a satisfactory way to live a fulfilling life.

With our 21st century perspectives, we assert that inter-racial marriage ought not to be confronting and Barney Elmwood is right when he says that skin was only there to make a body waterproof and the colour of it mattered not.  We believe that LGBTIQ+ relationships should be welcome in any society and that no one should tolerate unwanted sexual harassment.  But that does not mean we can’t acknowledge that, well within living memory it was very different, and not just in stuffy old Ireland.  I think that’s what Donal Ryan was getting at with Strange Flowers.  Change is hard, and to be the first or the only one is hard.  There is quiet courage being celebrated in this book, and it pays attention to heroes in the vanguard of change.

Beejay Silcox at the Guardian is disappointed by its gestural rendering of village racism but she doesn’t miss the point: it’s a novel that explores all kinds of love.

Author: Donal Ryan
Title: Strange Flowers
Publisher: Doubleday, (Transworld, Penguin Random House), 2020
Cover illustration by Owen Grant; cover design Jo Thomson/TW
ISBN: 33172012332845, pbk., 228 pages
Source: Kingston Library