It’s the middle of the night. Soldier is the only one awake in the house, watching her sleeping son, Sailor. She loves him beyond all else, but so often he exhausts her, physically and emotionally. Leaving an adult, autonomous professional existence among colleagues and friends for the lonely and unrelenting territory of first-time motherhood is a change both shocking and profound. This experience has been portrayed in many different ways, but Irish writer Claire Kilroy’s riveting novel, Soldier Sailor, must be among the most extraordinary and honest.
The book, which is told in the first person and addressed to Sailor, early on recounts how “I almost left you once”. Easter is approaching, Soldier’s first as a mother, surely a marker of new beginnings after so many desperate nights of broken sleep. But by Good Friday, she is shattered and burning with anger at her husband – his refusal to understand, his losing his temper and asking her to leave, his move to the spare room, where he snores peacefully through the nocturnal turmoil. After cleaning the house with excruciating care, Soldier takes her baby to a cliff path, planning to leave him there, her suicide note tucked into his shawl. The baby’s cries restore her, and she drives back into her life.
Kilroy is a superb writer. Over and over again, the absolutely right sentence appears, begging to be reread and savoured. Apparently without effort, though there will surely have been plenty, she recreates, in often searing detail, the existence of a stay-at-home mother living with a largely absent working husband who cannot, and apparently does not wish to, take a step into her world. Your father was there initially, she tells Sailor, but then he “wandered off, stepping out to make a phone call from which he never fully hung up”.
And yet the father is not demonised, and though the relationship buckles, it holds. There is some ranting, about the long hours at the office and the unnecessary golf games, which Kilroy manages to make seem, all at once, unhinged, completely justified and often very funny. (Humour punctuates the book, black, sly and deft.) But her ability to control and chart mood means she is also capable of a restrained delicacy that perfectly conveys the tenderness and immutability of the mother-child bond. When Soldier meets an old friend, now a full-time father of three, at the playground, they are drawn together by shared experience and memories of their previous lives. Kilroy adroitly calibrates the hope and relief the relationship represents, without ever going down the obvious path.
It’s not all abstract emotion. One of the novel’s strengths is its particularity. The scene in Ikea when Soldier, her husband and Sailor go to buy the child a bed – and he runs away – is instantly recognisable in its ordinariness and its terror. The journey to the in-laws for lunch is also pitch-perfect: the lateness because Soldier has to organise everything, while the husband makes no contribution and watches a football game on TV as he waits impatiently.
It is hard to find much to criticise in this taut, skilled novel. Occasionally, the reproduced child’s speech teeters towards cuteness, and the final, lingering paean from mother to son is possibly a little too long and self-indulgent, but these are very minor grizzles.
Soldier Sailor could so easily have been a strident, overdramatic litany of struggle. Instead, within its modest span are packed, yes, the despair, the absurdity and the weariness of motherhood, but also, and supremely, the matchless joy and love.
Soldier Sailor, by Claire Kilroy (Faber, $32.99).
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