FAMILY TIES

 

Winter Bloom by Tara Heavey  simonandschuster.com

Faithful Place by Tana French (Kindle edition) tanafrench.com

In the beginning I thought these two books could only be connected by their setting: Dublin. But further reading revealed, despite divergent writing styles, a comparable theme focused on the importance of family. Heavey uses the recurring image of the garden to cultivate her multiple characters and plant the plot. French’s plot is driven by one character, Frank Mackey, a rough, coarse Irish undercover policeman, seeking to solve the twenty year old murder mystery of his first girl friend. Mackey’s deeply dysfunctional family members and neighbors in Faithful Place, the Dublin neighborhood he grew up in and his family still inhabits, all play minor roles.

In both books, moments and place matter. Frank as first person narrator declares early, “In all your life, only a few moments matter. Mostly you never get a good look at them except in hindsight, long after they’ve zipped past you.” (Faithful Place, Loc.47-48) Frank is always looking back: analyzing again what happened, how it happened, what he missed. He also uses the past and hindsight to justify his abandonment and, ultimately, betrayal of his family. His abusive, alcoholic father and the rest of the family’s passive acceptance drive him from Faithful Place.  In Faithful Place similar characters are drawn apart by place.

In Winter Bloom diverse characters are drawn together by place, a neglected walled garden they work together to restore. The book has multiple viewpoints, but one is Eva who discovers the garden and remembers “…her own secret garden. It was small, but contained many possibilities…She felt as if she were the first person ever to see the garden. As in really see it.” (Winter Bloom, P. 16) The momentary possibilities of the garden sprout and bloom: budding relationships, flourishing connections, thriving stories.

Each book’s plot relies on past events to drive it. In an author interview, Heavey said she first wrote each character’s story one at a time: Eva, the bereaved widow and mother; Emily, the unwed mother; Uri, the Holocaust survivor; Mrs. Pendergrast, the abused wife. But her agent felt they were too episodic and advised her to break up the individual stories into chunks, although each story is still narrated sequentially. This structure works well if only to keep the reader reading…to see what happens next; but also to see how all the stories connect within the garden.

In Faithful Place, French has Frank declare, “There’s no password more powerful than your past.” (Faithful Place, Loc 1091) And certainly Frank’s past is the password for the book’s plot. As he strives to solve the murder he remembers past episodes and scenes.  As readers, we need to figure out their significance and relationships, just as Frank is. No straightforward plot line here!

Both endings are celebrations of sorts. Winter Bloom has an “Autumn Party” where family forgiveness is the theme and characters are working on happy endings. Faithful Place has Frank reminiscing for a special Friday night during a lost summer, a gang from the neighborhood is having fun together with “a couple of big bottles of cheap cider...All around us the Place was humming like a beehive shimmering with a hundred different stories unfurling.” (Faithful Place, Loc. 7169) But there is no happy ending, Frank commits the ultimate Irish sin of betraying his family and he can’t go home again. It is only now he realizes his lost, “…and I hope to God that somehow or other, before it was too late, we would all find our way back home.” (Faithful Place, Loc. 7219)