The Wild Laughter by Caoilinn Hughes review – an Irish Cain and Abel
Caoilinn Hughes’s acclaimed debut novel, 2018’s Orchid and the Wasp, explored the long fallout from the global economic crash of 2008 through the coming-of-age story of Gael Foess, part of a formerly wealthy Irish family rapidly on the descent. Gael was a 21st-century Becky Sharp, cutting a merciless swathe through Dublin, London and the New York of Occupy Wall Street. Hughes’s follow-up, the darkly adventurous The Wild Laughter, loosely follows a similar theme of the consequences of boom and bust, but stays closer to the festering claustrophobia of home.
“‘Ireland is where strange tales begin and happy endings are possible.’ Charlie Haughey said that, and mind what a hammer of an end he got.” Wisecracking and woeful, Doharty “Hart” Black is the 25-year-old younger son of a terminally ill, failing farmer, Manus, a proud man known by his sons as “the Chief”. While Hart’s brother, Cormac, two years his senior, got the university education and then founded a series of successful startups in Dublin, Hart is left toiling on the family farm in County Roscommon, along with the boys’ brittle mother, a former nun, whom Hart mostly refers to with hostility by her name, Nóra. The elder son is favoured by the Chief for his flamboyance and entrepreneurial talent and by Nóra as a co-conspirator against the hapless Hart, whose eventual scapegoating is foreshadowed throughout.
It is 2014, and against the backdrop of the shabby farmhouse and tiny watchful community the Chief is dying: a rasping, leaking, slow affair made all the more agonising by the family’s catastrophic debts. Eight years earlier, just prior to the bursting bubble of the Celtic Tiger, the Chief was lured into a bad property investment in Bulgaria by a shark-like neighbour. “Got himself half a million in debt. Two sun-soaked chalets he’d never cross the thresholds of when he hadn’t the roof over our heads paid off.” When he stubbornly refuses to declare bankruptcy, the Blacks’ land is remortgaged and leased back to them, a humiliation echoed later in the novel when Hart buys back a donated suit of his father’s from a charity shop.
Resentment and low-level violence seethes between the two brothers, whose only seeming points of agreement are vengeance against the man who ruined their family and a determination to carry out their father’s final wishes by helping him end his life – an act illegal in Ireland. (The basis of the story lies in the case of Marie Fleming, who in 2013 unsuccessfully petitioned Ireland’s Supreme Court to change the ban on assisted suicide.)
The differences between the Chief’s sons are distinctively drawn. Hart, at times disturbingly reminiscent of an older Holden Caulfield, doggedly worships their father; Cormac, who is as flashy as his cufflinks, appears more lazily ambivalent in his affections. “His mind was a luxury”, Hart reports at the novel’s beginning, his face “a menace of features”. (Hughes was a poet before she started writing novels; her metaphors and similes burn bright.) The pair are gifted a dream of a femme fatale in the person of Dolly, an older actor whose stagey duplicitousness is evident from the breathless tropes Hart uses to describe her: hair “black as space”, a red wool coat “spilled around her like a pool of blood”, earlobes “white downy disks, weightless as Eucharists or Disprins”.
Hughes has fashioned a sturdy drama that, despite the plot twists of its last section – which centres on a court case and a betrayal – is more powerful in its first two thirds. The Chief, his mind and body unravelling through pain, is a significant creation, 6ft 4in with a “large head – the only part of him the recession couldn’t shrink”. Undertones of the Cain and Abel story rumble appropriately beneath the surface, most vividly realised in an electrifying volte face during which the sympathetic local priest, Father Shaughnessy, makes his own unexpected confession.
Narrators are notoriously unreliable: Hart’s first-person account is noticeably erratic, while capriciousness is a hallmark of the other characters, too, with Nóra’s changeable past, Cormac’s dodgy business dealings and Dolly’s enjoyably flagrant lies. Hart’s embittered anguish is resplendent throughout; his role in one of the book’s key scenes makes for an outstanding passage of manipulation, misery and culpability. Even the kindly priest is not without his baser side when it comes to the final question of the wretched Hart’s choreographed redemption. “Was there no resting place for the old Irish in the new Ireland – a patch of land resistant to liquefaction?” Hart wonders. The Wild Laughter’s reckoning is as much concerned with these far-reaching effects of history as with the ongoing brutality of austerity.
• The Wild Laughter is published by Oneworld (£14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
