This absorbing and wild debut feels at once muzzily folkloric and sharply contemporary. It follows Nell, an artist who lives on a wind-whipped island without ties or commitments – until, that is, a group of women living an even quieter life commission her to make an artwork that will tell their story. The Inions, as they’re known, have come from all over the world to Rathglas, a crumbling old convent overlooking the sea. Naturally, rumours abound about them being a cult or a coven, but really they’re ‘ordinary women wanting a different kind of life’, who have rejected hatred and inequality in favour of seclusion and simplicity.
Gleeson, who in 2020 published Constellations, an intimate essay collection about bodily life, paints a convincing portrait of what it is to be an artist today. For Nell, art has gone from a ‘full-time livelihood’ to fitting around ‘making ends meet’. She also gives guided tours of the island to visitors, who arrive hungry for stories about ‘the sound’, the recurrent humming phenomenon that plagues the inhabitants and brings with it strange occurrences. She enjoyed acclaim when she was young; now she’s ‘scrabbling for money, just so that she can be the only thing she knows how to be’. It’s a familiar tale, and yet the brooding atmosphere the author conjures is entirely unfamiliar and otherworldly.
Beginning in September, the book unfolds in fleeting chapters, which, together with Nell’s looming deadline (her artwork must be finished in time for Samhain, a ceremony the Inions hold on the first day of November), lends it a natural propulsion. Mostly we’re seeing things from her perspective, though occasionally the point of view shifts to her on-off love interest Cleary, two of the Inions (Muireann, who’s the most open-minded and talkative, and Maman, their self-appointed leader), or the American actor who shows up intent on making a documentary about them and uses Nell to do so.
From the start, it’s clear that a dark and unsettling undercurrent courses through the island. The prose sways seamlessly between romantic (‘Getting what you want is not always what you need, in the end’) and rough. The natural world is both bountiful and foreboding: clouds are described as ‘clutching rain in their grey bellies’, day ‘breaking in varicose shades’. Throughout, Gleeson creates a sense that life as the women know it can’t continue, and as the book draws to a startling close, readers will find themselves rapidly turning the pages.
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