Ordinary Human Failings (2023)
Why this one?
I’m reading selected entries from the 2024 Women’s Prize Longlist. I chose this one on the basis of an intriguing description and cool cover.
Megan Nolan (1990- ; active 2021- ) was born in Waterford, Ireland and is based in London. Her father was a theatre director, Jim Nolan. She studied Film Studies and French at Trinity College Dublin, but dropped out before completing her degree.
She began her writing career as a journalist, writing essays, criticism and reviews for the New Statesman, Guardian, New York Times and others. Her debut novel, Acts of Desperation (2021) won a Betty Trask award and was longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. This is her second novel and was also shortlisted for the Nero Prize (Fiction) and the Gordon Burn Prize.
Thoughts, etc.
Ordinary Human Failings is set in London in 1990, as a housing estate community is rocked by the death of a toddler, with suspicion quickly falling on Lucy, the 10-year old daughter of an Irish family, the Greens. A tabloid journalist, Tom, is dispatched to investigate, with a strong focus on digging up dirt on the Green family, whose outsider, reclusive status means they are the inevitable target of attention for the crime. It’s pitched as a thriller, with a mystery to be solved, and Tom is convinced he’s going to be the one to solve it. He moves the family into a small hotel, plies them with drink and looks for the inevitable trauma that has led them here, and a motive for the crime.
One by one we meet the family members, initially through Tom’s eyes and then in flashback to earlier points in their lives, predominantly in Waterford, Ireland, where they grew up. From Lucy’s mother, Carmel, we first learn the story of her teenage romance that led to her falling pregnant, and the desperation this crime (in late 1970s Ireland) threw her into, culminating in a move to London - first in a belated attempt to procure a legal abortion, and then to stay to avoid the stigma caused by her young, out of wedlock, motherhood. Her mother Rose, dead in the present day, engineers much of the move and is the solid rock of a family we learn has struggled to stay afloat without her presence.
Her half-brother Richie is an alcoholic. Blackout drunk on the day of the child’s death in 1990, Tom is convinced that his role is key to unlocking further controversy, and thus his ‘story’. Delving into Richie’s story, we largely learn of a brief moment in his younger life when he appeared to be getting his life back on track with a job at an Italian cafe in Waterford, and a close friendship (maybe pointing towards more) with its manager. After finding pleasure and fulfilment in his fresh start, he throws it all away with one Friday night relapse in which he manages to completely trash his job and burgeoning friendships in pursuit of a couple more bottles of wine. His disgrace coincides with his family’s move to London, so rather than staying behind to make a go of it, he joins them and falls into even worse patterns in England.
Finally, from Carmel and Richie’s father, John, bereaved and reticent in the present day, we go back again to Waterford, this time to explore his relationship with his first wife, Richie’s mother. His is a sad story of crossed wires in a relationship he believes is solid and healthy, but in which the other party is unfulfilled and goes to increasingly wild lengths - even once their child is born - to live a different life behind his back.
As readers, each of these flashback sections richly illuminates the history of a family initially painted as reclusive oddballs, presumed by their neighbours and by Tom as somehow enablers of an ‘evil’ act by their youngest family member. And it’s true that in 1990 the Greens are a family in total disarray, having never really recovered fully from their respective traumas and now adrift without the steering influence of the family’s matriarch Rose. None of the three surviving adults has offered anything remotely constructive in terms of Lucy’s childhood development, and this knowledge renders the reader complicit in the belief that they must be responsible for Lucy’s apparent actions on a deeper level.
Throughout the book, though, Tom - himself a functioning alcoholic (almost a requisite of his profession) - becomes increasingly frustrated with the Greens’ stories as none seem to point him to the seemingly inevitable ‘dirt’ he’s looking for. There is no grand, overarching story that has brought the family to where it is today, just a collection of small decisions - mistakes, wrong turns, ‘ordinary human failings’ - that have led them to their present circumstances. Some of their behaviour has undoubtedly been incredibly poor, but all of it has roots in past trauma, which none of them have ever faced head on. Carmel has effectively dissociated from her existence, Richie has dived even further into alcoholic obliteration, and John has maintained a quiet stoicism that has tipped over into a detachment from reality.
For Tom, this is a disaster - no story. For the family, there’s a sort of learning that goes on throughout Tom’s interrogations that leads them to at least one crucial truth which sets at least some of them on a (very tentatively) more positive footing for the future. For the reader, there’s real pleasure in these quietly sad stories that have in some collective way led this family into a connection with real tragedy. It’s a brilliantly nuanced exploration of the complex roots of that tragedy, very deliberately set in an era where external forces (the tabloid press, the conservative tendency in Ireland and the prejudice against the Irish in England) all conspired in painting a starkly black and white picture of the world.
Score
8.5
Another really strong read, albeit again one suffused with a deep sadness. I’d be very happy to see this one on the shortlist.
Next up
Isabella Hammad’s Enter Ghost.
