Review of STRANGE FLOWERS by Donal Ryan

 4 Stars

In this novel, a man tells his son that “there was more to the blind man’s story.  More than we’re told in the Gospel of John.”  What Donal Ryan has done is to take another Biblical story, that of the prodigal son, and retell it, to show what happened after the return. 

In the early 1970s, Moll Gladney leaves her family home in rural Tipperary without explanation.  Her parents Kit and Paddy pray for her return, and their prayers are answered five years later when Moll reappears.  She remains tight-lipped as to why she left, but a black Englishman, Alexander Elmwood, arrives shortly afterwards, claiming to be her husband and the father of their infant son Joshua who is described as a “strange flower” because of his “perfect, unblemished whiteness.”

The book explores what happens when strange flowers appear in an environment where differences are viewed with suspicion.  Joshua is not the only strange flower.  Alex, by virtue of his colour, doesn’t fit into the rural Irish village, but there are others who don’t conform to the expectations of society and the Catholic Church in an insular village.  More than one character tries escaping the confines of the village because of feelings of not properly belonging.    

Because he is so foreign, Alex experiences racism.  When he first arrives, people stare and he “expected sometimes that people would begin to throw coins at him, as though he were a street performer, or a beggar, some kind of exotic mendicant.”  Jokes are made at his expense and he is called “Kunta Kinte.”  Josh also experiences prejudice; walking home, his path is blocked by young men on horseback who then proceed to discuss his colour as if he weren’t present:  “Well, he doesn’t look one bit black.  Except for his hair and lips, maybe a tiny bit.”

Classism is also examined.  Paddy and Kit are always servile to the members of the wealthy Jackman family.  Paddy is dependent on them for work, and the house in which they live is on Jackman land. Andrew Jackman, the son, once tells Paddy, “You’re a servant, Paddy, that’s all you are, you’re not much more than a beggar man, and my mother and father could fuck you off our land any time they wanted.”  Paddy “understood in that moment what it was to be a herded animal, to be barked at and rounded on, to be sheepish, to be cowed.” 

The novel exposes life in a small village where gossip runs rampant.  When Moll disappears, people think “that Moll Gladney was either pregnant or dead, and it was hard to know which one of those was worse.”  When she returns, there is much speculation as to why she had left, “all sorts of theories swirled about, fables and yarns and tall tales and fairy stories and lascivious conjecture.”  When Alex enters their lives, he is constantly aware “of the whispered conjecture, of the jokes he knew were being made at his expense, and at the expense of Moll and Paddy and Kit and Joshua.” 

I love some of the characters in the novel.  Paddy and Kit emerge as heroic.  They are a quiet, ordinary couple but with so much dignity.  They have a strong faith and are honest and hard-working.  What is most emphasized is their capacity for love and forgiveness. 

In fact, the book can also be seen as a study of love of all types.  Paddy and Kit love Moll despite how she hurt them and her flaws.  Alex is so deeply in love with Moll that Kit thinks of it as “the reverent way he loved her.  Never loud in his love, or showy, but quiet, nervous almost, like he was afraid he was in a dream and if he wasn’t careful he could accidentally wake himself.”   To be with her, he moves where he has no one, “no comrade, no family, no Jamaican café, no Sunday school or backroom church, no street of his own people.”  He is also motivated by his love for his son, believing that his son would not be accepted were he raised by his black grandparents.  Paddy and Kit welcome Alex into their lives and grow to love him.  In the way he thinks about his father, Josh’s love is obvious.  Other types of love are also presented. 

Ryan’s style may not appeal to everyone, but I love immersing myself in his lengthy, lyrical, run-on sentences.  His descriptions of the landscape are stunning.  A paragraph that stands out for me is Alex’s meditation on the Irish landscape:  “the greenness of the place.  Everywhere greenness, trees heavy with it, hedgerows dappled light and dark and every shade of it, rolling fields of grass and green hills as far as his eye could see, and a lake below them in a silver line and, at the far side of it, below the blue and white and grey horizon, more greenness, more grassy hills and forests.  Streams of flowers dazzling through the green along the roadsides and the lanes.  Branches drooped with berries reaching out from hedgerows, everything looming and buzzing and dripping with life.  Even the rain had a shimmer of green to it.”

I did not always enjoy Josh’s rewriting of the blind man’s story.  The embedded narrative just didn’t work for me because it impeded the flow of the story, though I understand it serves as a parallel to Josh’s life.  There are actually many Biblical references which a person, with more knowledge of the Bible than I, could spend quite some time analyzing.  Certainly the chapter titles which are titles of books in the Bible are significant.

This, like other Donal Ryan novels I have read, is highly recommended and deserves not just to be read but to be re-read.