As You Were by Elaine Feeney review – a poet's darkly comic fiction debut
This tragicomic tale of a thirtysomething mother with a terrible secret serves as a keen-eyed portrait of modern Ireland
Stephanie Merritt
Tuesday 18 August 2020
Elaine Feeney has published three acclaimed collections of poetry before turning to novels, and her fiction debut, As You Were, is steeped in the rhythms and evocative language that mark her poems. Voices jostle with one another, Galway colloquialisms woven in with text speak and emojis, as a run-down hospital ward serves as a microcosm for contemporary Ireland.
The narrator, Sinéad Hynes, a mother of three in her late 30s, has been admitted after collapsing. It’s eight months since she was diagnosed with terminal cancer, but she has put off telling her husband (and sons): “I thought it was a dreadfully selfish thing to do to another person, fill him up with worry and uncertainty, to try and make him figure out death.” Instead, she obsessively Googles drugs and cures and outcomes alongside the mundane business of daily life.
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| A sharp eye… Elaine Feeney. Photograph: Julia Monard |
But Sinéad is a master at hiding pain. There’s the stillborn daughter whose loss she can’t discuss with her husband, and the rural childhood with a bullying father whose voice breaks into her present in cruel, stream-of-consciousness monologues. From her bed she observes her ward mates deal with their own buried secrets. There’s Margaret Rose, the working-class matriarch recovering from a stroke but still organising her youngest daughter’s trip to England for an abortion (“Manchester would deal with the bother in the uterus. Like it had helped so many times before, with Irish women, rollie cases, taxis, coffees, airport toilets, sobbing, solitude, trauma, travel, Solpadeines, secrets”). There’s Hegs, the local politician who protests too much that he was never involved in backhanders; and Jane, whose dementia has left her living half in the past with an abusive husband and memories of a tragic, forbidden love.
The common denominator is a particularly Irish brand of shame, which still exerts its grip down the generations: “It was the most contagious thing inside and outside Hospital.” There are obvious comparisons with the lyrical writing of Eimear McBride; Feeney’s voice is at once fresh and sharp, with an eye for the comedy of existential dread.