Beloved Stranger by Clare Boylan. Little Brown. UK £16.99 HB.

PAT BORAN

(Sunday Tribune)

Lily and Dick Butler are a lower middle class Dublin couple in the twilight of their years, back in the days when scientists were first claiming aspirin could prevent heart attack and Gay Byrne was being tipped to take over This is Your Life. How they've survived half a century of marriage might be something of a mystery to them, but it's certainly a mystery to their independent, and independent-minded daughter, Ruth.

An only child who's had to carve a world for herself through her father's chauvinism and her mother's apparently willed blindness, Ruth suffers her father's dismissals (her architectural work is 'Piffling ladies' stuff'), but manages to love him still, despite additional suspicions that it was her own birth which must have 'disturbed the secret pact that lay between them'.

Evidence of disturbance is certainly glimpsed in the early pages of this book where Ruth, after a visit to her parents, returns home to confide in her diary, 'Pa has been spending money', unknowingly recording the beginning of something altogether more disturbing in the lives of all three of them. That Clare Boylan has chosen a diary for this recording however might not have been wise. Yes, it reminds us that Ruth has no other available ear, no other accommodating relationship to which to turn. But with her mother Lily at the beginning of the book remembering a sexual experience in her youth as the kind of thing she read about in novels, and only pages later describing her symbiotic relationship with Pa as 'nothing you could write a book about', the somewhat self-conscious literary framing becomes almost overpowering and threatens to reduce the reality of the characters.

At the same time, of course, a book about it is just what Boylan has written and, overall, an impressive one it is too. While wife and daughter struggle to understand how and why Pa, 'a crusty old blighter, dictatorial and a bit tight-fisted' is suddenly writing very large cheques for mysterious purposes, his behaviour has already taken an even darker turn with visions of intruders under the bed and paranoia blossoming like shadow.

In a sense by-passing the Alzheimer's story the reader thinks is coming, Boylan goes somewhere altogether more interesting now: into the delicate springs and mechanisms that hold this family unit together in a time of terrible strain.

Being outside the primary relationship (though obviously shaped by it), Ruth acts as a lens through which we glimpse its intimate details, and at the same time hers is a thoroughly modern world which we can compare to that of her parents'. We see that her determination to be open with her mother about her rangy sex life means that Lily doesn't any longer ask her about men ('for her daughter tended to respond by talking about sex'). And here we learn something of the secret ingredient of this long relationship, and of the difference between it and the temporary relationships Ruth finds herself in. For her mother a word could put the world right. ('"Good girl," he used to say after sex. That was the bit she had liked best.') In the daughter's world, language is jaded and unlikely to provide transport of any kind, as one man friend makes clear when he asks, 'What's on offer? Mediocre mousakka or a very good fuck?'

The situation is happily complicated, and the switching of the author's sympathies between mother and daughter are among the most satisfying things in this book.

While Pa is increasingly sucked into madness, and institutional life, the structure of Ma's symbiotically related world also comes crashing down and she becomes something like the figure of Lear on the heath, arousing our sympathies where Pa somehow arouses only our curiosity. In a story about the mysteries not of parenting, or even origin (common themes in Irish contemporary fiction), but of relationships in which 'the husband is the head of the wife, as Christ is the head of the church' - and in which the wife can still hold to the belief that old age is 'a fine excuse to wear comfortable clothes' - truce rather than balance is what keeps the peace.

Boylan's two secondary characters are a gay male doctor who, being the only young man who is more than a brief sketch, seems perhaps too clearly destined to connect with Ruth, and Connie Herlihy, a secretary friend of Dick and Lily's who, the opposite of what Ruth's liberation would want for women, wiggles her bottom when she settles herself in the chair at Dick's hospital bedside, knowing 'from experience that almost nothing made a man (even an old man) feel as good as giving dictation.'

A quite unbelievable ending only reduces the sense that there is something being lost (and fought for) here, but it does not spoil a novel that manages to throw much clear light into the dusty recesses of that most common and least known construction of all, the family.

© copyright Pat Boran