Why don’t you just leave him? It’s the all-too-frequent question asked of women suffering domestic abuse, put only by those who have never experienced the crippling fear, the abnegation of self-worth, the constant anxiety about children, money, a safe place to live. But Ciara Fay, pregnant for a third time, does extricate herself and her young daughters, Sophie and Ella, from the control and aggression of husband and father Ryan, and the challenges of her escape and the building of a new life make for compelling reading. Irish writer Roisín O’Donnell has won awards for her short fiction but this is her debut novel and she impresses.
After being told that she can’t fly with the children to her mother and sister in Sheffield without her husband’s permission, Ciara begins a desperate process of finding somewhere to stay, while threatening, manipulative and self-pitying texts arrive regularly from master gaslighter Ryan. A room in a hotel, provided by social services, becomes home as she negotiates time for the girls to see their father, deals with her pregnancy and Ryan’s attempts to gain custody, manages to get work and searches for an affordable rental property.
Domestic abuse is a large subject and a complex one, which any author needs courage to take on, and O’Donnell makes a good fist of it. There is a truth and immediacy to this book, a credibility and sincerity that seize the reader’s attention and make the pages easy to turn.
O’Donnell instinctively understands the confirming and convincing power of detail – grabbing the kids’ favourite toys and clothes, the pegs left scattered under the clothesline, putting on eyeliner while sitting in the car so as to look smarter for yet another job interview, dealing with the fickle Dublin weather.
Ryan’s toxic personality and his dominating mother’s intrusion are believably drawn. From the opening scene, where Ciara and Ryan take the girls to Skerries beach and he insists on their swimming in the freezing sea, O’Donnell’s prose is sure and the reader is right there, feeling the cold wind and seeing the gulls gliding above “as if manipulated by invisible wires”.
O’Donnell can write and her book is a memorable treatment of an all-too-common situation. There are, though, a few of the betraying signs of a first-time novelist who could have benefited from some gentle editing. Greater impact could have come from pulling back. The book is 400 pages, so the pace occasionally falters. There are avoidable swerves into sentiment, particularly regarding the children (Joanna Trollope is the model for creating realistic children and teenagers), O’Donnell’s research into the Irish policy of “hotelisation” for abused women and children is not always sufficiently absorbed, and the initially effective use of italicised rhetorical questions to portray Ciara’s panic is repeated too often.
The long email of apology from her sister Sinéad is a false step. O’Donnell has nailed the opening of the novel but she has rather rushed the final section. Ending the book on a note of hope and possibility is not a problem in itself, but the last pages feel a little too quick and easy.
Many of these aspects are matters of judgment, which settle as an author matures and produces more work. But helping an already talented writer like O’Donnell, who clearly has a great deal more good fiction in her, would have made Nesting even better.
Nesting, by Roisín O’Donnell (Scribner, $39.99), is out now.
