Cork writer Billy O'Callaghan's second novel is described by the author himself as 'a skin of fiction laid over a considerable amount of truth and fact.'
Is it possible for trauma to be inherited? Can hardship, emotional as well as physical, be passed down from generation to generation like our hair or eye colour? Returning to favoured themes of love and loss, Billy O’ Callaghan also explores this interesting idea in his new novel, the semi-biographical Life Sentences.
The Cork writer's previous short story collection The Boatman and Other Stories felt as if it drew heavily on real, lived experience. This new novel seems to have been a project of even greater personal significance for the Cork writer.
Life Sentences is divided into three sections, each representing a different generation of O’Callaghans. A family tree on the opening page illustrates the timeline of events and shows where the three family members we hear from in the coming chapters sit on it.
What follows is a sort of hybrid creation, or 'a skin of fiction laid over a considerable amount of truth and fact, drawn from things I’ve been told over the years’, in the author’s own words.
The opening section takes place in Douglas, Cork in 1920. Four years after the Somme, family-man Jer is still reeling from the horrors he witnessed on the battlefield. The flashbacks torment him both in his dreams and waking life. His struggle to piece the fragments of himself back together is reflected in a landscape still recovering from years of famine. He observes his wife’s emaciated frame as she gets out of bed in the morning with sadness, notes the sour taste of malnourishment on her breath when they kiss. He feels the ‘quiet pump of her sadness echoing through her body’ as he holds her.
Jer’s memories of war are extremely visceral and written without restraint by O’Callaghan. The image of rats feasting on a wounded soldier overnight, howling in agony as he is eaten alive, is one that is not easily expunged. These hellish scenes are why Jer can pick a fellow vet out of a crowd based on a look of ‘cracked, glass-eyed madness’ alone. Surviving, and thus remembering, is its own life sentence.
We need your consent to load this YouTube contentWe use YouTube to manage extra content that can set cookies on your device and collect data about your activity. Please review their details and accept them to load the content.Manage Preferences
Jumping back to 1911, the middle section of the book is told from the perspective of Jer’s mother Nancy. At nineteen she leaves the majestic Cape Clear island for the mainland, the sole survivor of a family wiped out by starvation. Finding work in a big house, she’s soon seduced by the gardener Michael Egan, and becomes pregnant.
Rejected by Michael and with little choice, she turns to sex work to get by. ‘Like the others, I did what I had to do, blocking it out in the moment and burying it to a depth that defies easy recollection’. Nancy’s story is the most devastating, not just because of the misfortune that befalls her, but because of her conclusion that she must somehow be responsible for it all.
‘Born a foll only ever learns the most cruel lessons’, she says. This was the fate forced upon many desperate and vulnerable women at the time, and once ‘fallen’ there was little hope of ever regaining any social standing.
We need your consent to load this YouTube contentWe use YouTube to manage extra content that can set cookies on your device and collect data about your activity. Please review their details and accept them to load the content.Manage Preferences
In the final section, we hear from Nellie, Jer’s daughter. On her deathbed in 1982, she recalls a pregnancy that resulted in a stillbirth. With baby John born out of wedlock, her father and partner decide to bury him in the graveyard under the cover of night, leading to a confrontation with the local priest. This experience carries a life sentence, a pain that will endure until Nellie’s last breath. For better or worse it shaped her, much like the war shaped her father. ‘We’re most of us who we are because of what we suffer through’, he tells her.
Life Sentences is tragic and solemn, but also hopeful and redemptive in its own, quiet and meditative way. It may not seem like much, but perhaps our ability to endure is the best inheritance we can hope for. O’ Callaghan, quite fittingly, dedicates the book to his Nan, ‘with the greatest of admiration.’
Billy O'Callaghan writes about his first novel My Coney Island Baby for RTÉ Culture
My Coney Island Baby is reviewed here by Paddy Kehoe
The Boatman and Other Stories is reviewed here by Amy Finnerty
