The Queen of Dirt Island

The epigram of Donal Ryan’s The Queen of Dirt Island comes from “History” by poet Mary O’Malley.

“Let the books remember the local battles.

 Re-write the plot. Let the harvest wither.

 This is your life. She is your great event.

Keep her in the sun.”

The novel begins, “She was born.”

The infant’s father drives her home from the hospital, settling her and her mother in their new cottage near where he’d been raised. He drives toward work with a light heart, stops to pick up a hitchhiker—a man he knows—and soon after collides with a truck running wide of the centerline.

“…in a flash and a heartbeat both men ceased to be.”

The child, who will be named Saiorse (meaning freedom), is the narrator of the story that follows. It’s told in short, vignette-like chapters that move forward and backward in time, approaching then circling around the mysteries that surround her. Each small piece she discovers over the course of the book is like a piece of a jigsaw puzzle, eventually revealing the full picture.

Saiorse has a happy childhood with her mother Eileen and her Nanna, Eileen’s mother-in-law, who are the closest of friends. The two women adore one another but also sometimes fight like cats, often—for the reader—hilariously. They mourn the loss of Saiorse’s father deeply at the same time they’re perfectly competent at living without him. Looking back, Sairorse realizes that her view of him then was “…a father who was dead, forever young, sitting on a chair with his own father and all his dead relations, playing cards, waiting for Judgement Day.”

Nana’s full of stories about her girlhood that Saiorse loves to hear again and again. My favorite was how her mother managed to get her a cardigan for her first communion—which involved the sale of chickens. Eileen, though, is secretive about her past.

They visit Saiorse’s father’s grave often, and one day a woman in a black coat appears. Eileen and Nana seem happy to see her, then sad. They call her Sally. “Our daddies went to heaven on the same day,” the woman tells Saiorse.

Who is Sally?

Nana and Eileen avoid the question.

When news comes that Eileen’s mother has died, Eileen and Saiorse attend the funeral, where they are treated badly by Eileen’s brother Robert. Why?

 And there’s the inheritance of family land that comes into question not long after.

Saiorse’s life gets complicated with adolescence. Her friendship with a troubled girl named Breedie Flynn carries her to an event that changes her life drastically and forever.

It would give away too much to say what happened, so I’ll just say that, as in real life, there’s love, loss, betrayal, astonishing developments, terrible sadness and unimaginable joy as the book unfolds. Finishing, I felt as if I’d lived in this small village in Ireland for a while, privy to lives of this small family of women.