In the Prologue of The Coast Road (Bloomsbury Publishing 2024) by Irish writer Alan Murrin, a woman is being questioned by police about a house fire that she admits she knows was intentionally lit, although that, she says, ‘is another story altogether’. The story proper then begins some months before this incident. So right from the first page we know there is going to be a tragedy, although we don’t find out the details until much later in the novel.
Set in a small coastal village in Ireland in 1994, the narrative centres on Colette Crowley, a writer and poet, who some years earlier left her husband and sons to pursue an affair with a married man in Dublin. She has now returned to the village, amidst the scandalous outrage of most of the locals, and finds that her husband is denying her access to her children. Colette sets about trying to rebuild a life for herself and trying to gather the remnants of what she once had, her clear goal to reconnect with her boys and have some sort of ongoing relationship with them. To this end, she asks an old friend, Izzy (who has a son who is friends with one of Colette’s boys), to help her surreptitiously but seemingly casually engage in some contact with her son, Carl. She and Izzy develop a strange but deepening friendship, to the astonishment of everyone else in the village.
In this closed and isolated community, where everybody knows everybody else’s business (or thinks they do), Colette and Izzy push their luck further and further, each helping the other. Colette’s bohemian presence influences Izzy to pursue her own individual dreams rather than continue to be content to be a wife and mother. And Izzy, with a mother’s fear of estrangement, construes situations in which Colette can see her son.
This is a brilliantly observed and intimate portrait of the lives and friendship of these women, written with assured prose, biting dialogue and expansive description. But it is not only these characters that dominate the pages. Another couple, Dolores and Donal, become inextricably linked with Colette when they rent a cottage on their land to her. The local priest has an unusual friendship with Izzy that the villagers find hard to reconcile or accept. There are political, social and economic issues at play here, and all in the face of the upcoming referendum about whether divorce should be legalised.
This novel encapsulates the difficulties of the times for Irish women, and the limits and parameters placed around their lives, in stark contrast to the men, who seem to have a completely different moral code. With themes of expectation and responsibility, family estrangement, betrayal, friendship, desire, close-minded judgment, family violence, intergenerational trauma, self-determination and prejudice, The Coast Road is a tender, authentic, passionate and quietly triumphant exploration of what it means to be human, to love and to leave. It navigates the qualities of anger, rage, violence and revenge in a tale that is sharp and wounding. It dares to question what happens when people – or more specifically women – dare to go against societal expectations.
The writing is so close and fine, so well-crafted, so detailed and intimate, yet each interaction represents the broader brushstrokes of Irish culture and social norms of the time. And while we gather through the development of the narrative that some of the women do indeed embark on a journey of self-discovery, we are also aware of that tragic Prologue hovering over the ending. Something bad will happen to someone. The fact of not knowing who or how, or why or when, keeps us turning the pages with trepidation, especially as many of the characters – especially the women – are so sympathetic. Even though they are all very different, we come to know and respect their differences, to recognise their similarities, and to understand their hurts and grievances in a way that makes us want to cheer them on. The underlying pre-knowledge that one of them may commit an horrific act, or otherwise be the victim of a tragedy, is almost unbearable.
I thoroughly enjoyed this book and highly recommend it, especially if you love quiet stories about the lives of ordinary people that explode into complicated stories of unexpected and shocking tragedy, the guilt that plagues us, the hopefulness that can still be found in the world, and the compromises people make for the sake of love. The Coast Road is puffed on the front by Sarah Winman and Louise Kennedy, which gives you some idea of the quality of the writing and the intensity and complexity of the narrative. A perfect bookclub read with thought-provoking content and explosive themes.