The Largest Baby In Ireland After The Famine - Hardcover

Barnett, Anne

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1860497977 ISBN 13: 9781860497971

Publisher: Virago, 2000

Synopsis

Every Sunday the men met at the bridge. Felix Campbell was there with a couple dozen men. They were all shapes and sizes, ages and wits. What they shared was history, what they knew was their place. Farmers all, some creating the impression that they lived a more urgent and passionate existence in the fighting fields of France, than in the potato fields of reality.

Felix was smoking and talking when the bridge-gatherers spotted a figure moving over the brae. The walker was a woman, most certainly, but who? Women's strict observance of the day of rest left little time for gallivanting. And where could a stranger be heading when there was nowhere she could go that the men wouldn't have known about? Then the woman appeared. She was all colour and sway, and as far away as imaginable from the local women. Pale, pale skin and strong dark auburn hair falling free to large wide hips. She wore a purple shawl.

That night Felix, a bachelor, aged 43, living in the house he was born in, dreamt of purple. Purple in the shape of a woman.

About this title

Review:

As the title of Anne Barnett's debut novel suggests, this is "a tale that makes things bigger than they are". The everyday, intricate dramas of a mid-Ulster rural community are observed with the grace, humour and languor of a fine story-telling voice that is assured, romantic and replete with the dour idiomatic phrases of people who never travel beyond a 10-mile radius. In the townland of Ballymully, near Cookstown, lives Felix Campbell, a Protestant and a bachelor through and through, who at 42, dreams of a woman in purple. "He grew up in a glen with a glen-shaped soul, and baptism in his heart and catechism in his mind", unprepared for "the tribulations of high emotion", so when he falls for Sarah-Ann O'Malloran, a big bawdy widow with 14 children, his soul sparks for the first time and he discovers lonesomeness.

In Sarah-Ann, irrepressible, idiosyncratically attired and unconcerned about the morals of "a very small town in the centre of a very small country", Barnett creates an exceptionally vivid, larger-than-life character, who was born weighing in at 13 pounds, is the novel's eponymous heroine. Not only does she cavort in "silly frippery" with Sean Boyd, the polygamist, she's Catholic and that strikes fear into the Ulstermen who gather on the bridge of a Sunday, not only for Felix's heart, but for his farm as well. "Irish history is always the same ... To be born Protestant or Catholic in Ireland, almost always sets the course of a man's political identity ... It was as easy as telling a dog from a cat."

Against a backdrop of World War One, which Protestants hope will end Home Rule for good, Felix awkwardly courts Sarah-Ann, regardless of the inevitably cruel gossip. The narrative lilts and circles in a seductive dance around the shame and uncertainty of the lovers. Its incantatory tone invokes generations of myth, while its sharp and funny characterisations and colloquialisms give a blunt and honest modernity. Sarah-Ann may have hair "as black as a raven's" but she wears no knickers. In detailing the small gestures, sleights, motions and notions of a community split by repressed and powerful emotions, Barnett evokes the wider incongruities of history and the oddities of desire and allegiance. Subsequently, The Largest Baby in Ireland After the Famine is an effortlessly lyrical and moving novel. --Cherry Smyth

From the Publisher:

Reviews:
‘The haunting strength of this novel lies in its vivid recreation of a mid-Ulster farming community in the first half of the 20th century...With gentle humour and well-considered prose, Barnett writes about people both knitted together and driven apart by religion and considers what it might mean, for the individual and for the group, for someone to push beyond convention and tradition and routine. A mellow yet thoughtful debut’ Daily Mail

‘The steadiness and sureness of Barnett’s style draws the reader into its peculiar, often beautiful, cadences...a delicate love story set against the backdrop of the First World War...best enjoyed for the unconventional elegance of its prose’ TLS

'Love and spite in 1916 Ulster - a mesmerising still life with vivid flashes of colour and humour. A memorable debut' - Clare Boylan

About this edition

• Publisher: Virago
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 1860497977
• ISBN 13: 9781860497971
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 288