Himself

“Here he is now.”
“Here's himself.”
“You're a fine figure of a man, Mahony.”

Himself is written in a mashup of many genres — a supernatural/murder mystery/comedic romp – and set on the west coast of Ireland, the brogue drips thickly; every welcoming smile masks a secretive heart; every po-faced denizen reserves the right to decide who may live within their village. Absolutely everything about the plot felt slightly off-kilter, nothing resolved completely to my satisfaction, and yet, I was consistently charmed by the language and the atmosphere. And in a way, that was enough.

Mulderrig is a place like no other. Here the colors are a little bit brighter and the sky is a little bit wider. Here the trees are as old as the mountains and a clear river runs into the sea. People are born to live and stay and die here. They don’t want to go. Why would they when all the roads that lead to Mulderrig are downhill so that leaving is uphill all the way?

The book opens with a prologue set in 1950, in which a young woman is brutally (graphically) murdered, and in the first instance of magical realism, her infant son is hidden and protected by the forest itself. The narrative then jumps ahead to 1976 and that infant, having been raised in a Dublin orphanage and now a twenty-six-year-old greasy long-haired hippie, returns to the village of Mulderrig; led to the place of his birth by a photograph that just came into his possession. This hippie, Mahony, has the kind of smoldering good looks that draws housewives to their windows to watch as he walks past in his tight bell-bottoms, and his natural charm helps him to find allies even among those who never normally talk to anyone. And Mahony will need allies: He learns nearly immediately that the village is divided over whether his young mother had run away from Mulderrig or if she met a grisly end, and as the reader already knows where her bones are buried, we understand that there may be danger to Mahony in his efforts to stir up the past.

The dead are drawn to the confused and the unwritten, the damaged and the fractured, to those with big cracks and gaps in their tales, which the dead just yearn to fill. For the dead have secondhand stories to share with you, if you'd only let them get a foot in the door.

Just like his mother before him, Mahony is able to see and interact with ghosts, but this isn't as helpful in a murder investigation as one might expect: Spirits have their own agendas, replaying events from their own lives, and don't have the consciousness required to be interrogated as to what they may know (this is helpfully outlined in a conversation, but as the ghosts do all react to what is happening in the present around them, it felt like an unsatisfactory explanation for why Mahony couldn't just ask the dead witnesses what they knew about his mother; he mainly ignores them). For the most part, the ghosts around Mahony are played for laughs (the commode-bound priest, the lovesick suitor sunning his organ), but there's a poignancy to the pretty little girl skipping through the forest with her head stove in, and one character awakens a menacing shadow that creeps and terrorises. And the supernatural goes beyond mere ghosts: A venal priest suffers a plague of frogs; a library-bound actress summons the wind to stir her books for inspiration and protection; a storm blows the soot from chimneys into the form of a snapping wolfhound. Mahony is frustrated that his mother's ghost is the one that he has never seen (which makes him question whether she really is dead), but the reader knows that she is following her own agenda:

For nightly, still, she came to him: she rose up out of the Shand, shrugging off her cape of silt. A river goddess, worn smooth as an ancient carving, wearing waterweeds and dropping diamonds with every step. Her footprints dented rocks.

So much of the writing is lovely and lyrical like that, and as I've said many times that I particularly love an Irish storyteller, even the slangy everyday exchanges were charming to me. Much is spooky and much is witty as the narrative switches from past to present and back again (illuminating small town life and the grip of the Church and the hypocrisy of the so-called pious), but the plot doesn't really hold together: I could put behind spoiler tags all the pointless or unresolved threads, but my biggest complaint is simply that there was no emotional payoff (I was holding my breath at the end, waiting for everything to come together in the way I was expecting, and when it didn't and I was forced to release my breath, I felt literally deflated). As this is a first novel for Jess Kidd, I can understand her desire to throw everything in, and I'd be happy to read whatever she comes up with next: this is a strong voice, slightly wasted here.