Review of BIG GIRL, SMALL TOWN by Michelle Gallen

 4 Stars

Twenty-seven-year-old Majella O’Neill is an overweight reclusive who lives with her alcoholic mother in Aghybogey, a small town in Northern Ireland near the Irish Republic border.  She works in a fish-and-chip shop called A Salt and Battered!  The novel depicts a week of her life.

The book is set in 2003, five years after the Good Friday Agreement that ended most of the violence of the Troubles; however, the legacy of the Troubles looms over Aghybogey which remains a community divided between Taigs (Catholics) and Prods (Protestants), with little contact between the groups.  Certainly, Majella's family has been affected:  years ago her uncle died in a bomb explosion and her father “disappeared”; recently her grandmother died because of a beating. 

The book begins with a list of things Majella dislikes which extends to “ninety-seven items, with subcategories for each item.”    There are seven chapters, organized by day of the week and chronologically by time, but within each chapter there are sub-headings based on Majella’s dislikes.  For example, “4:04 p.m. - Item 12.2: Conversations: Rhetorical questions” and “7:15 p.m. - Item 3.4: Noise: Shite singing” and “10:00 p.m. - Item 8.4: Jokes: Repeated jokes” and “11:07 p.m. - Item 4.1: Bright lights: Fluorescent bulbs” are some of the subtitles in the Monday chapter.   This structure effectively elaborates items on Majella’s list.

The character sketch of Majella is the book’s greatest strength.  Though the term is never used, it is quite clear that she is on the autism spectrum.  She craves routine, enjoys repetitive actions, has difficulty reading faces for emotions, and finds social situations awkward.  To relieve stress, she has a habit of rocking and flicking her fingers.  She dislikes change so the monotonous routine of her job is perfect for her.  She tends to be gruff and straight to the point but is also kind-hearted. 

Majella’s observations of life in Aghybogey and her comments about its residents are astute.  The tensions between the Catholics and Protestants are mentioned often.   Though she is Catholic, Majella sees flaws in her religion too.  A priest tells Majella they have not been able to find her father to notify him that his mother has died:  “the Catholic Church had feelers stretching into every home that hung a crucifix on its wall, a reach wider, deeper, creepier than the police.”  One of Majella’s co-workers is Polish and though everyone accepts them because they’re hardworking, she knows that in truth, “the Poles were welcomed because they were Not Prods.  Every Pole who came over to Northern Ireland tipped the scales another wee bit lower in favor of the Catholic side.  Majella reckoned it’d be a different story if the Poles were Muslim.”  And typical of a small town, before the day is over, everyone knows that Majella went to a lawyer for a reading of the grandmother’s will and even knows the contents of that will.

The dialogue is phonetic.   For example, Majella greets customers with “’What can ah get chew?’”  Some dialect does present some confusion.  Oxters, craic, gurning, minging, boke, stocious, guldered, cleastered, rifted and redd are some of the words that had me checking a dictionary.  Like Majella’s Polish co-worker, I learned some new words for drunk:  blootered, lamped, mouldy, peeshed, lashed, stoven, langered, goothered, and gee-eyed. 

There is considerable humour.  Someone who has drunk too much can be described as “full as a sheugh” or “full as a bingo bus” or “full as a Catholic school”!  Some of the humour arises from Majella’s literalness.  When Marty complains about a constantly flickering fluorescent light by saying, “’Well, fuck me if ah don’t take a hammer tae that light the nights,’” Majella’s thought process is hilarious:  “Majella knew Marty didn’t have a hammer and so wasn’t likely to attack the light.  She was not sure of the relationship between him not hammering the light and her having to fuck him.”  When a woman wants to build bridges across community divisions, Majella has to be told that the bridges are not literal bridges:  “This struck Majella as a much more difficult engineering project, one complicated by the fact that although most people would see the need for rebuilding the literal bridges, no one had an eye for invisible bridges.  Majella herself did wonder why no one had considered drawbridges in the whole scheme of things, which could serve as bridges when the need arose.”

This is not an action-packed novel.  It focuses on life in a small Irish town as seen through the eyes of an usual protagonist who simply wants to live an untroubled life.  Majella will remain with the reader long after the book is closed.