A Review of Donal Ryan’s “Strange Flowers”
The Vanishing
And now I come to a novel whose review doesn’t write itself. I have no snappy introduction about this book, and, after having read this short burst of a novel that clocks in at roughly 200 pages, I find myself wondering what I have to say about it. It is a very beguiling book, but it turns out that it is a multi-generational family “epic” — if you can bandy the word “epic” for a book that’s only 200 pages long. I suppose if I must say that there’s a problem with Strange Flowers, it might be that. We don’t get too much time to grow with these characters and the mid-point of the novel is a retelling of “Jesus heals the blind man” story from the Gospels. Needless to say, while the book is certainly literary (its author is a Booker Prize nominee), it is also a bit on the weird side. It’s hard to parse what the book, as a whole, is really about because it seems to exist solely to twist readers’ expectations. Even the write-up about the book that accompanies the review copy is vague because saying too much could spoil the whole story.
So here’s what I think I can safely say about this novel: set initially in the year 1973, the story concerns a family that lives in rural Ireland with the surname Gladney. There’s sixty-something father Paddy (how Irish of a name is that?), a reserved mother called Kit, and a 20-year-old daughter named Moll. Paddy is both a mailman and a sort of shepherd for a wealthy family whose land they live on. One day, Moll goes missing. It turns out that she has gone on to live in London, which is highly contentious given the times and the troubles Ireland has with the rest of Great Britain during the setting of this tale. Why she has disappeared is not revealed until the end of the book. In any event, the disappearance isn’t for forever as, five years later, Moll returns home. However, following her is a foreigner who both claims to be her husband and to be someone who has sired a baby with her. And even saying this much might be saying too much.
The book is an interesting take on race relations in England in the 1970s, at least in part. I was expecting the book to be more of a discussion about racism, but it turns out that the peoples of Ireland are incredibly accommodating for the most part. Who knew? The story, then, is a bit on the uplifting side, though tragedies do occur. It turns out that the biggest tragedy is that the offspring of Moll and this foreigner (the son is named Joshua, in case the Biblical reference to the story he’s writing wasn’t enough for you) is a wannabe writer — whose writing, truthfully, isn’t all that good. Thus, we get treated to the blind beggar story rewrite that is just ponderous — even if it might be an allegory or metaphor for something else. Honestly, for a book that’s 200 pages, this read could have been much shorter. (Or much longer, if you wanted to unspool the generational family stories out a bit more — which could have been easily done.) Reading the healing story is a bit like being tortured because the author of this book thinks it means something to the characters of this book. It’s just bad storytelling, plain and simple. Maybe, though, that’s the point? (Maybe the book is saying that Joshua is a conceited squirt?)
In any event, Strange Flowers might be a challenging read for some readers because there is no dialogue to be had anywhere in the tale. If a character speaks, it is done so in the exposition or full narrative of the story without any quotation marks. I suppose this is done to make the work seem more literary. This leads me to the next authorial tic that Strange Flowers suffers from: the run-on sentence. I can understand doing away with the dialogue, but the story does get hard to follow when you have sentences that seem to just never end. Ryan goes on and on and on and on with getting a certain musicality into the text, I suppose, but it does nothing to make the read any clearer for the reader. In the end, I guess you can say that I found Strange Flowers to be a bit on the pretentious side. This is too bad because there’s a germ of a great story buried within this novel about people needing to rely on one another in the face of adversity. Plus, there’s that awesome family saga waiting to burst out from the seams.
All in all, Strange Flowers is not a bad book, but it is a somewhat disappointing one. Just once it starts getting interesting, we’re treated to a half-baked Biblical story that doesn’t appear to go anywhere fast. It’s a real shame because I wanted to know more about family life with the foreigner, and how that worked in a place such as rural Ireland at a time when England and London, in particular, had its issues with racism during the period that this book is set. The fact that the novel sidesteps this a little seems like a lost and squandered opportunity. There was a good tale to be told, but, unfortunately, the novel skips to the next generation, who we know so little about aside from Joshua’s attempts to write a short story based on the Bible. I know, I know — I’m a Christian, so you’d think I would have appreciated this tale within a tale. However, the writing was stilted. Put it this way, Strange Flowers could have done without the mid-section of the book. It might have made for a sterling novella if it did so. However, as it stands now as a published work, the novel certainly needs a bit more polish and a little less literary flair. It’s a gripping yarn in places. It just needed to sustain the reader’s interest across the whole of the work, which, alas, it doesn’t. At least, not very well.
Donal Ryan’s Strange Flowers will be published by Penguin Books on June 15, 2021.
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Get in touch: zacharyhoule@rogers.com
