The Truth About Love by Josephine Hart

And the boy's stream of consciousness is a kind of poetry: "Olivia is standing at the edge of the lawn between crying-kneeling Mama and me. Her head quickturning to me then to Mama. To me. To me or to Mama? Her hair swings, her head swings, swings high-low in the sudden breeze." The book is about the playing out of the consequences of that accident: the injured boy hiding his lost limbs from his mother, the mother's agony of loss that unsettles her reason, the father's desperate attempts to love his wife back to life, the sister's sacrifice of years of her own youth to help her mother. Josephine Hart lost one of her own brothers young; the depiction of grief here seems to have a truthfulness that goes beyond a novelist's empathy.

Most of the events happen on a small canvas, in a provincial Irish town in the Midlands in the early Sixties; well, Josephine Hart grew up in Mullingar, almost the quintessence of provincialism in Irish terms. She came from an Ireland that was still romantic in its nationalism and Catholic in its religion, and relatively poor; the little world of this novel.

Contemporary Ireland, materialistic, irreligious and wealthy, is briskly documented (though the novel comes too late to record the late death of the Celtic tiger), but only at a distance, from England.

There is, too, a parallel narrative here, of a German resident in the district, with his own memory of loss during the war and his own unhealed wounds. His passion for a married woman, never fully requited, gives another take on love: sexual obsession. And his cultured detachment from the Irish society in which he has chosen to live gives a larger perspective on this introspective little world. Its wordiness, the articulateness of its inhabitants, itself bears out the author's own take on the Irish, that "the English language is their first weapon".

This is a curiously satisfying little novel, characteristic of Josephine Hart in its moral seriousness. It takes on the condition of Ireland, the Troubles, as well as the small lives of a few individuals but the central point is well made: there is pain in the heart of love..

The depiction of grief here seems to have a truthfulness that goes beyond a novelist's empathy.