In Donal Ryan’s latest novel, Strange Flowers, a twenty year old Moll Gladney, the only daughter of impoverished parents living at the mercy of Castle Catholics in North Tipperary, goes missing. Five years later, she returns with a black British husband and their white baby. You read on for another hundred pages until you learn that Moll went missing because she’d gotten an intercaste kiss off the Castle Catholic wife, Ellen Jackman. C’est ci.
Most people I know who read, are reading Donal Ryan. RTE declares that with Strange Flowers, “Ryan reaffirms his place amongst Ireland’s greatest wordsmiths”. The Irish Independent describes it as “an expansive and thought provoking parable”. In an interview with The Irish Times, Ryan mentions that he “casts no shade”, aka, makes no negative comments in public about other writers, and taking its cue from him, The Irish Times refrains from evaluating his latest work. Friends have said to me that in Ireland – where so much depends on your network, who your parents are, and whether or not you are alumni of one or two universities – no one writes negative reviews. No published writer gets a roasting in a broadsheet or by the national broadcaster. A former colleague of mine, someone’s son and a Trinity graduate, confessed to me that he did not have the courage to write a negative review even of mainstream American bands for a local paper. Across the Irish Sea, after lavishing Strange Flowers with praise, The Guardian goes as far as to admit “Strange Flowers may be the weakest of Ryan’s novels, but it is still a gorgeously wrought book”.
The first Donal Ryan novel I attempted to read was From a Low and Quiet Sea. I opened the book at the boarding gate in Vienna Airport and drank from its pages until they called my flight. On a sentence level, Ryan demonstrates pure mastery. He is the foremost contemporary writer of the Hiberno-English sentence. His words flow in a natural North Munster vernacular. The levity of his writing zeros out the length of his sentences as he carries you through page after page at great speeds. In Vienna, by the time they called my flight, I had almost made it to the end. However, once I boarded the flight, I forgot all about it and never opened the book again. Despite not having made it through From a Low and Quiet Sea, I continued to read Ryan’s books because everyone who reads seems to be reading Ryan. And here I am, bewildered and reluctant to express what I think about this book because in Ireland no one takes such risks, do they?
Was it through this same lack of courage that Ryan arrived at the careful plot of Strange Flowers? His sentences meander through themes of interracial relationships and lesbianism but he seals them within the safety of a 1970s time capsule. The main characters, who subsist on the good graces of their wealthy landlord, never question their lot in life. When their mind wanders, it waxes lyrical about the beauty of the North Tipperary countryside, never to fantasies of seizing the means of production. Ryan grazes on themes of inequality, class, and race but never bites.
Because of the black characters, the publishers went as far as to hire a sensitivity reader who flagged and removed some issues from the manuscript. Despite this extreme caution, if Strange Flowers had been the work of a white US or British male writer, its flatness would have courted controversy. The portrayal of the black experience in Strange Flowers reads like a caricature of a Zadie Smith novel crossed with the British soap Eastenders. While Ryan does orbit the issue of black fragility, his continued reticence leaves the text both ignorant and ineffective. The black characters seem too hot to handle in any meaningful or insightful way to the extent that if there had been no blackness in this novel at all, would anything have changed?
In lieu of the roast of Strange Flowers I feel bubbling within me, I offer the Internet a few key insights into Irish life as gleaned from its pages:
- The Gardai remain invisible in cases of sexual harassment, attempted murder, or rape. They materialise only if a black man comes to town, if a teenager has a tiny quantity of hash, or if the person who killed the one black man in town needs consoling.
- Sexual intercourse occurs indoors only in London. In Ireland, sensuality remains restricted to the riverbanks and the Fairyforts.
- The Castle Catholics, the 1% whose expansive inherited wealth means they determine the fate of those around them, are the only people who dwell on and lament the loss of even vaster fortunes they once held.
- A shift between two Irish women lasts a lifetime.