In Alejandro Amenábar’s 2001 film,The Others, a woman living in a vast, rambling house with her two photosensitive children becomes convinced that the place is haunted. In the course of the movie, Nicole Kidman's character becomes aware of unsettling phenomena that may or may not be happening in reality.
If you have seen that film and, moreover, were seduced by its incremental air of unease, then - permit, if you will, this cross-genre comparison - Nothing on Earth is for you. Through a long hot summer, a ghost estate in an unidentified corner of rural Ireland appears to harbour the very creature you might expect to live on a ghost estate, a changeling-like creature who makes her presence felt in O’Callaghan’s fictional debut. Distraught, desperately thin and seemingly on her own for the first time, the young girl arrives at the house of a local man. He is the narrator of the 174-page story who finds himself in a spot of bother with the law due to the manner in which he proceeds with the young stranger.
Beginning thus, with the young girl's arrival at the narrator's house, the story is told retrospectively of the family who have moved into the unfinished housing estate at the edge of the local village. (The sole occupants of the estate otherwise are an elderly couple.) Paul and Helen, along with Helen’s sister Martina, are an atypical family set-up, to say the least, who have returned to their native parish after years spent living in Germany. Paul and Martina find work at a local software factory, while Helen just seems to drift.
Is Helen the mother of the young changeling-like girl after all, as appears to be the case? Is Paul the father? Why are these four characters so strange to us? How is it that they never appear to be fully-realised in the way they sunbathe, wheel water back to the house in trolleys from supermarkets, or step into a pub for a drink? Even when they declare things or make observations, they seem to be hiding details, masking some great secret, some unspeakable trauma.
Flood is the developer of the housing estate in question, an equally mercurial character whom we meet early on. His nephew Marcus stays in a caravan at night, keeping an eye on the shells of empty houses. As the story progresses, Martina takes up with the younger lad, visiting the caravan each night for their amorous trysts.Then, what exactly does Slattery know? Slattery is the eccentric local big wig rattling around in his old house with his mildly unhinged wife, Hazel, a pair who you might expect to meet in a John Banville novel (or, just as likely, a Benjamin Black yarn.)
Nothing can be pinned down exactly in this finely-wrought story, nothing can be rationalised or taken at face value, despite the fact that O’Callaghan’s language is utterly direct and strives for an almost cinematic realism through every sentence.
It is a tribute to the Dundalk writer – who is already an accomplished poet – that we find ourselves keenly alert for the details that will hopefully clarify the mystery in the end, as the ground shifts and the summer burns on through pellucid blue skies. A bold debut.
Paddy Kehoe
