Malarky

Before she moves quietly off, she takes another look. She has to see it again. They're still at the same malarky. It's her son, her boy, and he's shaking himself stronger against that young fella. He cannot bury himself deep enough in him. Flagrant; he's got him by the hips, rattling in and out of them, almost like he's steering a wheelbarrow that's stuck on a stone, going no place.

Our Woman (Phil, or Philomena, or even, if you prefer, Kathleen) is a sixty-year-old Irish farmwife who is delivered some mind-rattling shocks in her life. In addition to witnessing that scene I opened with (and although there is quite a bit of malarky in this book, it never gets more graphic or lewd than that; if that offends you, read no further), her son has more shocks for her, as does Red the Twit who accosts Our Woman in the city. As Malarky begins, Our Woman is a recent widow, and as her grief-stricken mind attempts to sort itself out, she recalls and analyses recent events, leading the reader on a fractured romp through confusion and despair. And what a ride it is.

I have a great fondness for Irish Literature, and although author Anakana Schofield wrote and published this book in Canada, Malarky is firmly set in the Ireland of her youth, complete with bogs and churches and many cups of tea. The dialogue is pitch perfect, and although there isn't too much scene-setting beyond briefly describing the farm and towns, Our Woman herself can explain:

I don’t know why people talk about the sky and trees in books. I find very little to say about them myself. It’s a bit like talking about the wallpaper. They’re there.

That's fitting because Malarky is about interiors: shifting from first-person to third-person (which feels like Our Woman simply referring to herself in the third-person) and time-shifting from present to the past (even within the same paragraph); what we're seeing is inside the mind of someone who is going over the brink; a place where the wallpaper doesn't matter. Not only did I admire the fitting structure, but sentence-by-sentence the writing was so interesting, with Irish brogue and evocative metaphors:

• She always sounds impatient with me, even when wishing me Happy Birthday she sounds like she wishes it had less letters.

• They commenced their emotionless speech delivered like they were brushing their teeth and avoiding the gums.

Now to the spoilers: After Red the Twit describes to Our Woman the strange affair she's been having with the latter's husband (referred to only as “Himself”), Phil obsesses over the betrayal until she decides to reenact the affair with some stranger. When that is unsatisfying, Our Woman realises that what she really wants is to reenact the gay sex acts she has witnessed her beloved son engaged in; a fantasy that will only feel real if she reenacts them with a similarly young and handsome man. While I can't imagine my future sixty-year-old self presenting a sagged and wrinkled nudity to any young buck, Our Woman does just that. Happily for her, she finds Halim: a non-adjusting Syrian immigrant who has issues of his own he'd like to work through an accommodating female anatomy. This leads to the following type of bifurcated interior monologue:

Is there anything as lovely as a nimble, young man the way that sweet Halim is nimble? I thought as I put the butter onto my husband's bread. He loves his butter thick. The pristine condition of Halim's skin, all flat and elastic and not swinging and flopping and clouting ya with the remnants of every pint he's ever downed.

With the affairs and the constant obsessing about her son (with rare consideration given to the two daughters who have grown and gone away), Our Woman is obviously behaving erratically, but it doesn't really alarm the reader until she has episodes of “slipping” that land her on the psych ward. (It's here that Our Woman meets Beirut, the main character from Martin John, and I'm happy to report that it doesn't matter which order you read these two books in.) When first her husband and then her son Jimmy dies, Our Woman descends into a more constant state of grief-induced confusion:

All her Jimmy moments feel like they've rolled under a cupboard and she cannot quite reach them, even with the handle of the broom extended. Whenever she can't find a story she cries and she doesn't like this, she wants the story for herself, rather than the inconvenience of a wet face needing swift repair when knuckles knock against the window, the way knuckles do knock, or a voice calls out, so regularly around here. Hello within. God bless all here. Hello. Come in. It can feel like there is a set of teeth in through the back door every hour. Rap tap tap tap. All the different knocks she has come to identify. She'd love to roll under a cupboard and just wrap herself around the molecules of the story she cannot quite trace.

And that's pretty much where Our Woman is left in the end – addled and communing with her dead son's ghost – but the book ends on a hopeful note:

It's beautiful when it all makes sense, so it is. Occasionally it makes sense, just for a moment.

I wanted to grab quotes off of nearly every page of Malarky (and know that I've shared more than usual here), so it's hard for me to see if I've chosen the right ones to demonstrate what's so wonderful and unique about this read. I hope that the attention Martin John is garnering will expand Anakana Schofield's readership because, honestly, she's just that good.