Four Irish sisters in their 30s: Olwen, Rhona, Maeve and Nell. Four very bright sisters – each has a PhD (one honorary). All have succeeded – Olwen is a geologist, Maeve a celebrated chef, Rhona a high-flying academic with a specialist knowledge of citizens’ assemblies, Nell a professor of philosophy. But they are also four damaged sisters – when the eldest was 17 and the youngest not quite 12, their parents fell from a cliff and died, leaving Olwen to become mother and guardian to her siblings. Soon after the book begins, she chooses to disappear, and the search for her brings the siblings back together in Ireland for the first time in years and the past once more rises to meet them.
So far, so promising but so, perhaps, expected? Not in any way. The Alternatives is out on its own, an explosion of a novel by a writer of rare brilliance and power. Caoilinn Hughes is unafraid of large subjects, difficult emotions. And she seizes the language, gives it a vigorous shake. When Maeve caters for a Notting Hill dinner – “13 people (2 gluten free, 1 pescatarian, 1 vegetarian, 1 pomegranate allergy)” – Hughes skewers the pretentious hosts and their equally pretentious house. In the living room, with its “selection of hound-themed ornaments”, backlit plants and decorative books, “there is a prosperity of lamps”. Such joyous and arresting upending of language fills the book: one character “makes a strange hawing sound, as if spinning a mental Rolodex to find his own card”; in the Irish countryside to which Olwen has fled, “the wholesome green romps on and on, hurdling stone walls and clambering hills. Having gulped down yesterday’s foul weather like a good sport.” While swimming at night, Nell sees a friend “emerging from the Rorschach splotches of trees”.
In a novel that manages to be sharp, sly and funny as well as deeply moving and profound, Hughes traverses the lives of her characters, and how they have been shaped by, and have responded to, their loss: Olwen, tortured and always too responsible, burdened by her knowledge of the world’s future; Rhona, single mother to the beguiling Leo, over-organised, driven, constantly in motion; Maeve, talented, keen to please, uncertain, chronically short of money; Nell, beautiful and bisexual, but afflicted with a strange illness, exiled in America to escape the burden of being worried about.
To evade and avoid their own trauma, all, in different ways, have looked to global problems: compromised food sources, capitalism in a post-Brexit world and, of course, climate change. This is, also, a book about sisterhood – about bridging the isolating gaps that have grown between four women with very different personalities, each of them lost in some way, each realising, finally, the need for the bulwark of sibling support.
No intellectual quarter is given. Whether it be geological strata, philosophy or political theory, Hughes expects her readers to be alert, to keep up with her smart, articulate sisters. In some places, she can overdo this and the writing threatens to teeter into didactic mode. She also, successfully, risks presenting a good chunk of the book in the form of a playscript, as the sisters wrestle their way through reconnection and retrospection.
The Alternatives is a distinctively Irish novel, as are those of writers like Anne Enright or Sebastian Barry, in its spirit, its unexpected dialogue, its fearlessness with language. It is bright with intelligence, wit and energy, yet always sensitive to suffering and how it can be accommodated and expressed. True originality is a rare thing but Caoilinn Hughes has it; she really is like no one else.
The Alternatives by Caoilinn Hughes (Oneworld, $36.99) is out now.
