THE TRUTH ABOUT LOVE
By Josephine Hart
JOHN BANVILLE
"The Truth About Love is an ambitious and poetic weaving of a long-ago family tragedy into the tragic history, and histories, of our time. Josephine Hart has come home in triumph."
THE BOOKSELLER (February bookseller choice)
"I remember the controversy Josephine Hart's book DAMAGE created when it was published over a decade ago. Her new book is just as powerful. Hart writes in a style that is terrifying and beautiful at the same time. She catalogues the extremes of human experience, capturing our passions and frailty. It is a story of survival, recovery and love, and the language is pure poetry."
THE GUARDIAN
Is it an island I'm on?
Joseph O'Connor is haunted by a family story that mirrors Irish history.
Opening with a long and impressively sustained overture of fractured, Beckettian prose (you could imagine it being performed by Fiona Shaw), The Truth About Love is Josephine Hart's most ambitious novel to date. Her territory is not new. This is an Irish family story, in which the intimate and the political become ever-deepening metaphors for one another. There are echoes of Sebastian Barry's Costa-winning The Secret Scripture, Hugo Hamilton's memoir of a German-Irish childhood The Speckled People and the numinous fiction of Colm Tóibín. As in Barry's masterful novel, a sort of archaeology of loss is undertaken and the past bleeds into the present. But Hart's unique treatment of images that have been familiar since Joyce blows the dust off anything she might be said to have inherited.
A young man is torn apart in a horrific accident, described so vividly that it's shocking to read. The youth, a bright teenager, is said to have been experimenting with "building a rocket", but the suspicion that he was a bomb-maker hovers. In this unnamed town in the Irish midlands (Mullingar, perhaps?), memories are long and passions deep. His mother suffers a collapse, going "down somewhere, to a place without a name. Maybe someday explorers will find it and will map it out. Is it an island I'm on? How did I get here?"
Images of boundaries and colonialism abound, with metaphors of amputation, invasion and insularity. Fragments of memory jostle against lucid descriptions, giving a continuously involving jaggedness and urgency to the writing, an energy that rarely lets up. The book, while often bleak, is an exhilarating adventure in language; the words throw up sparks of strange beauty. Added to this, there is a facility for vibrant characterisation that animates the novel at every point. These sufferers are not being described, but are incarnated on the page. By leaving them alone, Hart allows them to live. This is a brave novel about hurt and the elusiveness of consolation, suggesting that if the pieces of a broken life can be picked up at all they are never going to fit together again.
An immigrant to 1960s Ireland, Thomas Middlehoff, the chess-playing son of an eminent lexicographer, is one of the main narrators. "The German" is an observer whose self-satisfied linguistic precision does battle with the realities he sees. He describes himself as "an elective outsider" with "an anatomical eye", and is the sort of onlooker who is interested in knowing the number of times the sign of the cross is made during a funeral mass (52, reportedly). At times he calls to mind Gulliver washed up among the little people. "The sudden, assumed intimacy. So quick. So unexpected. I have noted this characteristic before in conversations with them." The third person plural is his inescapable mode. He will always look down on this Lilliput.
His tone of cool detachment sets up powerful contrapuntal tensions with the voices of the other narrators: the boiling, poignant grief of Sissy O'Hara, the assessing, measured hopelessness of her husband, Tom, and the bookish, worldly clarity of their daughter, Olivia, who survives to become an actor in an Ireland of newer dramas and a chronicler of a murderous past. Her interest in the poetry and intellectual traditions of Europe bring an attractive capaciousness to the novel's mix of tones. It's remarkable that all these people are speakers of English, but each would need an interpreter in order for the others to truly understand. Hart seems to suggest that language itself becomes a contested territory in moments of intensified crisis.
For a novel of average length, the scope is astoundingly broad. Hart ranges widely and assertively through the mirrorland of Irish history. Joyce, Beckett, Wolfe Tone, Patrick Pearse, Ian Paisley, Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness are all mentioned, as is Bono, who is described, perhaps wryly, as a modern-day missionary eliciting "worshipful hallelujahs". A mordant humour often combines with a flair for acuity. "The English of a certain class seem to live in a permanent state of apology," one character remarks.
There are times when the symbols become a bit clunky. A woman in a troubled relationship asserts to her lover: "This is a good agreement. It is a good arrangement. Islands, close but separate." And occasionally Hart's considerable gift for lyrical beauty lapses into a phrasemaking that swaps clarity for effect. "In the case of Ireland the symphonic note of their national dirge creates a tinnitus of the soul. They were deaf to all else." There is also a difficulty not of Hart's making. In the novel's closing pages, the Celtic Tiger pads into the action, "the absolute, irrefutable national miracle of Ireland" and "the surprise ending to our sad story". The motherland of mass emigration and Yeatsian enmities is now "one of the richest countries in Europe". Alas, as everyone in Ireland knows too well, the boom proved woefully far from being absolute or irrefutable, and was based, in fact, on a corruption and greed that turned the country into a pyramid-selling scheme rather than a republic.
There was never a Celtic Tiger, merely the belief that one existed. Out of the ashes of that awakening, rough beasts may yet arise. If this fine and haunting novel of crushed hopes and evaded culpabilities were being completed by its author in 2009, its closing redemptive moments might be more complicated than they are. But it is to Hart's credit that her people are so brilliantly conveyed that one can imagine them surveying the latter-day wreckage, for they live beyond the confines of even her fiery and elegant prose and are impossible, once encountered, to forget.
THE TIMES
review by Sarah Vine
In the opening lines of this story, Josephine Hart takes us to a place that, for most of us, has hitherto been both unimagined and unimaginable. It's a literary punch in the solar plexus, a nightmarish, life-changing moment. In the faltering, flickering consciousness of a dying child she des- cribes, in a few simple but powerful words, one small but excruciating act of love.
The shock of this tragedy - a young lad killed by his own curiosity - seeps slowly through the pages of this book like molasses, binding the protagonists in its sticky wake and hindering their progress through the rest of life. The family's natural love for the lost boy now becomes their greatest source of pain, intensified by every memory, every careless word - and by the very depth of the emotion.
This is not a tale about romantic, idealised love, the kind that comes with soaring strings and sweeping gestures, but about a more dangerous kind of love: real, raw love, the sort of passion that can neither be controlled nor packaged. The truth about love, according to the author, is painted in myriad shades - and most of them are grey.
Our principal narrator is the boy's sister, Olivia. Everything we know about Olivia comes from other people's perceptions of her. Even her most intimate thoughts remain guarded, as much left unsaid as is said. The reader spends most of the book inside her mind, watching as those around her respond in their different ways to events - both global and parochial - and yet one never really gets to know her. One certainly never comes to love her, but perhaps that is the point.
Love, as seen through the eyes of Olivia, carries quite a rap sheet. It is responsible for her mother's anguish and insanity, robbing her of a parent and blighting her early adult life. Love is also weakness, physical and moral, the pleasure of objects desired and denied causing endless awkwardness and tragedy. Love is a barrier, too: to truth, to what is right and, ultimately, to happiness. To love someone or something deeply, unconditionally, uncontrollably is almost a kind of illness, a cruel addiction, a warping of the mind. “I am hungry for nothing except what I cannot have,” says the dead boy's mother, Sissy. “I will starve within and without, without him.”
The anger and selfishness of love induced grief is brilliantly portrayed throughout the book, in particular through poor, tragic Sissy, already wounded by the death of a daughter. How cruelly she views her devoted husband's attempts to “love me back to life”, how naive his belief that love can be a healing balm and not simply the source of all the pain in the world. How relieved she is to be “cured” of her grief by electroconvulsive therapy, returned to life with the part of her brain closest to her son mercifully muted, the bitterness gone, or at least in part forgotten.
As for Olivia, she is wary of love. She has lived with its loss, she has seen its effects: her family's German neighbour, a great intellect and respected man of letters, is reduced to rubble by a cruel love affair; she sees young patriots, willing to maim and kill for love of their country. It's a bleak tale, beautifully told, about the one burden we must all, as human beings, survive: love. “There is no escape from love and loss,” Olivia says. We must endure as best we can. But not, in the final analysis, “without much difficulty”.
THE IRISH TIMES
Loss in cold climate
review by Sorcha Hamilton
A boy falls to the ground. There are panicked voices around him, calling for a blanket, a doctor, an ambulance. Then the priest appears, shaking his head.
So begins this sixth novel from Irish novelist Josephine Hart. Its urgent first chapter is followed by the shifting perspectives of loved ones struggling to come to terms with the past. We see Ireland through the eyes of the German outsider, Mr Middlehof, who borrows a missal from his housekeeper for his “first Irish funeral”. We are led inside the tortured mind of Sissy O’Hara, the mother, as her grief renders her mute. The Truth About Love, set in rural Ireland a few decades ago, entwines family histories with broader, more political ones. By examining the mourning Irish family alongside that of a lonely German man, Hart thoughtfully probes some timely questions about love, homeland and the role of memory.
After the accident the O’Haras consider moving away from their home where everything is a reminder of their son’s absence. They travel around the country looking for a new house, but soon understand the need to stay close to what they have lost. By contrast, Mr Middlehof, a “member of a cursed tribe”, has removed himself from the German landscape, which reminds him of his own personal grief and, perhaps, that of his country.
In a casual exchange between the two men, soon after the funeral, the conversation quickly takes on a political edge: “You’re Irish, Mr O’Hara, forgetfulness is not possible,” Mr Middlehof says. “And you’re German, Mr Middlehof. No doubt memory is a burden.”
A large, bronze “warrior’s gate” with a helmet at the top grows symbolic. Shipped over from Germany and located on Mr Middelhof’s land, it was admired by the O’Hara boy. After his death, it’s given to the O’Hara family, who place it at the entrance to the garden where the accident took place. Later, Mr Middlehof wonders about the tragedies this gate may have witnessed: “Must every German gate have opened on to a horror?
At times, Ireland is a grey place where the “only colour is in the words and the language of the people”. The narrative makes for tough reading at times, particularly during the mother’s stay inside a psychiatric ward. The novel is a strong exploration of mourning and memory, brimming with provocative, if weighty, references – everyone from Günter Grass to Gerry Adams is mentioned – as Hart sets the narrative against the backdrop of Irish political developments through the decades and debates about German victimhood and guilt.
But perhaps most memorable are the subtle descriptions of grief, as when, for example, the daughter nervously watches her mother Mrs O’Hara looking out at the back garden, and wonders if the painful memory evoked by this scene of tragedy might somehow be softened by the falling flakes of snow.
THE SUNDAY TELEGRAPH
Is loving too much heroic or damaging wonders Lucy Beresford
The truth is: love hurts. Particularly the kind of love which spills over into obsession. For as Josephine Hart chillingly shows in her latest novel, love can be a torture which is impossible to give up – whatever the price.
In Ireland in 1962, an unnamed lad dies in a tragic accident. He had begged to be turned over, to spare his Mama the sight of his maimed body. Mama shuts down in grief and is, we think, only revived by a course of electroconvulsive therapy which gives her the courage to remain living in the place of pain. Before, throughout and after her depression, her husband’s devoted love remains so constant it borders on the heroic.
Ambitious in scope, Hart’s novel widens out from its quietly domestic opening to explore more than 30 years of Troubles in Ireland, and the country’s potent cocktail of religion, heroism and the idealisation of the dead. The lad’s sister, Olivia, starts to question her nation’s fixation on its ‘love dream’ of a ‘United Ireland’, but it takes a childhood acquaintance (a German immigrant writer) to suggest to her that wide-scale trauma, bloodshed and guilt are the risks you run when obsessively you weave a tapestry of heroes whose wounds ‘nourish the soil, a perpetual stigmata’. In this, Ireland is seen to stand alongside Germany in its tradition of using language (especially poetry) as a way to cope with the burden of memory and forge a national identity.
These are serious, perhaps contentious, ideas and Hart pulls no punches. Politically she assesses how damaging 9/11 was for IRA fund-raising, now that nine human bombers had ‘taught America what it was like to be blown to pieces for a cause’. Emotionally, and in often searing prose, she asks whether loving too much is not heroic, but damaging. That Hart lost three siblings of her own when young only makes this focus more poignant, and might explain why there is something almost unbearably fragile about this novel.
Yet despite the quivering emotional intensity, Hart’s writing is intellectually and philosophically robust. The novel grew on me, particularly after the mixed narrative threads of the first half settled down as Olivia’s voice turned into something less staccato. There were the odd witty one liners from an irreverent bishop but overall I felt I’d been dragged out to sea by a strong undertow to be shown that things in life can be endured – but only just.