The house had been derelict twenty years before, and it was rotting now. The roof had collapsed inwards. The front door was missing, and the doorway gaped, dark and threatening. He was glad to see the place in ruins. Glad that no young Celtic Tiger couple had come here with their dreams and their temporary money, to turn the place around and give it new timbers, new sheen. The house deserved to die.
At our last book club meeting, someone suggested we try a mystery, and as The Ruin had been highly recommended to me by someone whose opinion I value very much, I proposed it – and am now filled with regret. This sort of police procedural is not my usual fare, and for all I know this book is a fine example of its sort, but ultimately, I found the plot too convoluted and noncredible, the characters to be flat with improbable motivations, and author Dervla McTiernan wrote with a distracting chip on her shoulder – taking every opportunity to explain the multiple ways in which Irish women and children have been mistreated by the government and the Catholic Church. In the end, I found myself bored by the storyline and annoyed by bad writing.
“I found Maude, found Jack, in a house with no electricity, damp everywhere, the place basically rotting around them. Their mother was dead. I brought them to the hospital. I saw what had been done to Jack. I never forgot him, Aisling.” And that, at least, was true. “I cared about Jack. I care about him now. If there's something suspicious about his death, I'll find out. But I need you to talk to me. If you hear something, know something, come and find me. I won't let you down.”
The book begins with a prologue: Fresh out of the police academy, Garda Cormac Reilly is sent out on a domestic call of low importance, only to discover two abused and neglected children living in a derelict house with their freshly deceased mother. Fast forward to the present and Reilly – now a Detective Inspector and recently returned to Galway after a stellar career in Dublin – is having trouble fitting in with the local police force; given only cold cases and grunt work, Reilly is surprised when one of his assignments is to reopen the case on that dead mother and her orphaned children. Events in the present seem to be tied to the past, but Reilly is thwarted in his investigation by a lack of cooperation from his fellow Gardai: is this a routine hazing of a too-celebrated newcomer, or could the local police force have something they're hiding? Layer on a few other investigations (a cold case murder, a missing young woman, suspected domestic violence, a drug-addicted mother trying to get out of jail with her baby), then layer on the introduction and back stories of a whole host of characters that McTiernan will apparently be using in her Cormac Reilly Series, and that's a whole lot going on.
I'm not disputing that the Irish government, in concert with the Catholic Church, has a history of acting abusively and controllingly towards Irish women and children, but to my sensibilities, McTiernan lessens any message she was trying to get across by continuously throwing in detail after detail. The sexual abuse of children by priests is mentioned (as well as the level of control that made parents reluctant to complain about it, although this abuse doesn't actually feature in the story), and there are many discussions about a woman's pregnancy and the fetus' nonstatus as a “baby” and the ease with which she ought to be able to get an abortion, and there are discussions about the inability of social workers to remove abused children from their homes (because keeping children with their mothers, in every case, had been in the Constitution?), and a young woman who was raped was encouraged by her family not to report it because of the shame it would bring on them, and it's mentioned that a single mother was prevented from getting a job as a teacher on moral grounds, an obviously abused wife can refuse to lay charges against her husband, the jailed mother can only keep her baby with her until the infant turns one and then she will be put into the foster system (because her single brother, her only family, would not be allowed to adopt her)...I'm sure I don't even remember everything, but it was just too many issues for one book.
And then the writing: I found it so basic and cliché-ridden. A sample paragraph:
The words were a punch in the gut, a twisted knife in an open wound, but they woke Aisling up. Anger burned through the fog of grief that had dulled her since Jack's death, and she welcomed it, fed it. She clenched her fists.
I so regret suggesting this to the book club; I won't be back for the next Cormac Reilly installment.
