WHEN ALL IS SAID (2019)
By Anne Griffin
Thomas Dunne Books, 323 pages.
★★★★ ½
I went through several rings of Dante’s Inferno to get my mitts on the Irish novel When All is Said. I tried to download it when it first came out, but it came in a format unrecognized by my Kindle. I tried again last year and a different Epub format was rejected. I ended up getting a hard copy via interlibrary loan. It was worth it; Anne Griffin penned a very impressive debut book.
Its structure is deceptively simple: five toasts in one day inside a hotel pub partly owned by 84-year-old Maurice Hannigan. Maurice is world-weary. His beloved wife Sadie is two years in a grave alongside their stillborn daughter Molly, his journalist son Kevin decamped to America after the economic collapse of the Celtic Tiger, he has more money than he knows what to do with, and he’s a grumpy old guy whom people admire but don’t like. Think an Irish version of Fredrik Backman’s Ove without Ove’s humor or redeeming neighbors.
Over the course of an afternoon and evening Maurice raises a bottle of stout or a glass of whiskey to his dead brother Tony, Molly, his wife’s mentally challenged sister Noreen, Kevin, and Sadie. Maurice invites descriptors such as hard man, stubborn, vengeful, and misanthropic. He hasn’t been lovable since he was a child following his brother Tony around like a gangly puppy, but one by one the lights that guided Maurice have gone out.
Griffin’s novel is a mix of remembrances, regrets, tragedies, and secrets. We meet Maurice as a child living a hand-to-mouth existence on an Irish freehold too small to sustain a family. Hence, most of the family supplements their income by working for the Dollards, the largest landowners in the village. As was often the case of upwardly mobile Irish, the Dollards put on airs and affectations more akin to English gentry than their Irish counterparts. The Dollards, especially son Thomas, are demanding, cruel, and think it their right to discipline their social inferiors. Maurice sports a lifelong scar from one of Thomas’ fits of pique. Thus, he thinks nothing of picking up a gold coin that falls from a window as Thomas’ father Hugh berates him. That coin, a rare Edward VIII sovereign, will remain hidden for decades and plays a big role in the novel.
As the years go by, Maurice quits school—he is dyslexic, but few recognized such things in the 1930s—becomes a farmer, and develops surprising aptitude for making shrewd land deals. Soon, the Hannigan coffers fill as those of the Dollards empty. When grandson Jason offers to sell a desirable piece of land, Maurice lowballs him because he knows the Dollards have no choice. Even his charity has strings attached. When Hugh Dollard’s granddaughter Emily decides to risk all by opening a hotel in the village, Maurice is her silent 49 percent co-owner. (You can read about his ulterior motives.)
Can Maurice recover some of his humanity as he sits at his customary seat in the corner of the bar and revisits his past? Don’t bet for or against it. When All is Said is poignant, sad, and moving. Griffin takes us inside the mind of a man discovering a lot of things about himself after it’s too late. He absolutely adored Sadie, but was often too busy with acquisition and filled with spite to tell her so. Now there’s no way to give her what she really wanted, affection not things. In essence, the man who wanted to break others broke himself.
When All is Said isn’t fast-paced or action-driven, but is there a greater burden or villain than guilt? Griffin wraps this tragic self-revelation in layer upon layer of remorse and lost opportunity. She excels at deep development of departed and non-present characters that, in their own way, are more alive than Maurice. You may find yourself biting your nails from the tension of stillness, another deft maneuver on Griffin’s part. To invoke an Irish expression, this is a fine novel to be sure, to be sure.
Rob Weir
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