Paula McGrath’s first novel, Generation, was a powerfully ambitious examination of the immigrant experience –particularly that of the Irish to North America – and its indelible impact on subsequent generations. It was crowded with incident and people: one reviewer commented that “there is so much potential here that McGrath might easily have filled three novels with the characters she has created”.
The follow-up, despite having fewer overlapping stories than its predecessor, is no less broad in intent. Her seemingly boundless capacity for related narratives and disparate locations does, however, cause an imbalance which makes for a confusingly uneven whole.
The novel has, at the outset, three main strands: in 2012 in Dublin, a middle-aged gynaecologist, despairing of Ireland’s draconian abortion laws, is weighing up a career-changing offer from a London hospital. An only child, she would be leaving behind her mother, languishing in a care home in the last stages of Alzheimer’s.
Meanwhile, across the Atlantic in Maryland, teenage orphan Ali is ambushed at the funeral of her bohemian mother by a pair of unsmiling, hitherto estranged relatives, the parents of the father she never knew. Unconventional and rebellious, she hightails it for the uncertain protection of a local biker gang travelling west.
Then we have a temporal and geographical shift: 30 years earlier, 16-year-old Jasmine, living alone with a bereaved alcoholic mother in rural Athlone, sneaks away to Dublin and the ferry to London. McGrath’s portrayal of resilient Jasmine, living by her wits in a grey early 80s London of squats, drug addicts, pimps and endless drizzle is acute, as are her descriptions of the seedy terrain at the fringes of Jasmine’s battered A-Z. Following a dangerous encounter with a local gangster, she escapes back to Dublin, where her dogged resolve to survive on her own terms is infectious.
Aspiring to become a boxer in the years when women were banned from participating in the sport in Ireland, Jasmine, resplendent in gothic make- up, backcombed hair and piercings, works in a bookmaker’s by day and is secretly trained to box by George, a Kenyan medical student who appears blessed beyond his years with the ability to utter wise aphorisms.
Realistic dialogue is not one of the book’s strengths, but he and Jasmine have enough of an outsider status to move the plot along. Trouble from home looms in the form of Adrian, Jasmine’s disaster-prone leech of a cousin – which in turn provides an entry point to the most sorrowful and beautifully written stretch of the novel: a first-person monologue set 20 years earlier from a pregnant schoolgirl who had been forced to give up her baby. It’s a sadly familiar tale, relayed with anguished verisimilitude.
But what of Ali, left behind in compromising circumstances with the Maryland bikers? So engrossing is Jasmine’s story and counter-story that it is a complete surprise when Ali re-emerges nearly 100 pages later as little more than a one-dimensional vehicle underlining the book’s theme of fight and flight, and clearly designed to steer it to a rather implausible ending.
It is as if McGrath has reserved her interest – and her most sparkling prose – for Jasmine, and in particular a lovingly accurate recreation of a pre-Celtic tiger Dublin which is entirely recognisable today: the bars with their stained-glass windows, the river and the quays where Jasmine runs daily, the deserted beaches and lonely sea-strands.
Perhaps for her next novel McGrath will pause, take stock of her obvious talent and harness it to create one compelling, cogent work.
• A History of Running Away is published by John Murray. To order a copy for £14.44 (RRP £16.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
