“‘Mammmeeeeya? …’ ‘Mammy’s working, darling.’ ‘Mammeeya no but Mammy don’t work. I want you.’” Cara snatches every available moment to pursue her art; toddler Megan strives to enthral her mother. There’s a new baby now. Megan sighs and slips her cold little hand into Cara’s robe: her mother removes it gently but summarily from her breast and kisses her fingers. It’s a tender token that cannot appease the little girl’s thirst: “Boobies,” she lisps fondly.
This, of course, is charmingly natural and normal. But what if little Megan’s behaviour is a template for the behaviour of all four generations of Irish women in An Unravelling? Unweaned and unweanable, everyone is looking for Mammy, with sorrowing rapacity. Imagery of lactation streams through the novel: breastmilk demanded and withheld, rancid milk, cannabis-tainted milk that has to be “pumped and dumped”, the scarce milk of human kindness. Characters brood insatiably on the milk supply, its distribution and morality, “thinking of those silky newborn calves and the lowing cows, and what a terrible thing it was to steal a mother’s milk”.
At the top of the milk chain is 91-year-old Dubliner Molly, whose health is failing. “Tired today”, she longs for a final sleep “gentle as the rise and meld of warming pastry”. That is not going to happen. Molly’s three middle-aged daughters, two granddaughters and three great-grandchildren all yearn toward her as the fountain of life. Unfortunately the daughters also bite. They love her as predators do carrion. Something was denied them as children, which they see lavished on the next generation of girls, Cara and Freya, abandoned by their inadequate mother, Eileen, to be brought up by Molly, and now needy mothers themselves. Rahill’s plot turns on Molly’s intention to rewrite her will in favour of her granddaughters, for the daughters surely have plenty? But like Goneril and Regan in King Lear, Aoife, Eileen and Sinéad feel mortally shortchanged. If they can’t have love, they’ll grab lucre. Infantile grudge has set hard as concrete. And Molly’s solicitor is leaky: everything Molly confides about her will pours straight into the ears of her bullying and underhand eldest, Aoife.
Where did the misery and rage of Molly’s children originate? On the personal level, An Unravelling yields partial clues as it develops. However, this is an implicitly political novel. Its dilemmas and grievances derive from misogyny embedded in Irish religion and culture, and internalised by generations of women. Madonna or whore: women must be one or the other. This society prefers boys and frowns on single mothers such as Freya. Molly, who suffered the traumatic loss of a son, adores her sole great-grandson. Rahill’s female characters feel excluded from the world of fulfilling work in a family that derived its wealth from Molly’s husband’s artistic success. As in her celebrated collection of short stories, 2017’s In White Ink, Rahill explores the way pregnancy, childbirth and the duty of nurture force women into a mould that cannot comfortably fit. The harrowing violence of some of the action in An Unravelling also picks up themes of In White Ink, notably in Freya’s custody battle with an abusive ex-partner.
Rahill is a stylist of the highest calibre: Molly’s voice has a lilting brogue that sings from the page. Rahill’s prose is alive with inventive phrasings and imagistic virtuosity, especially in its presentation of the intimate experience of the fleshly body – the maternal body, the cruelly waning body, the body tormented by a conflicted and unravelling mind. I’ve seldom read a novel so rich in poetry. On every page you find throwaway expressiveness: in a garden a “shaggy pelt of ivy”, “the apple blossoms … pearling” in “the pollen-thick outdoors”. Sentences pattern themselves on alliteration, internal rhyme and assonance. Molly remembers newborn calves: “pink on them, clunk of bones under the slick hide and white gunk in their folds ... womb-wet skin and a blood smell so frightening and good like turned earth”.
Such prodigious richness inevitably slows the narrative pace, as does Rahill’s choice to represent, in a populous cast of characters, absolutely everyone’s inner voice and perspective: the narrative becomes ever more fragmented. There is a tug of war between a plot that wants to unfold and the characters’ tendency to wordy retrospection. If that feels like a weakness in this ambitious novel, however, it is an honourable one. Rahill’s aim is to represent, with visceral intensity, the whole disintegrating web of a family, in which every node is under strain and where paroxysms along the web affect every point of conjunction.
• Stevie Davies’s Arrest Me, for I Have Run Away is published by Parthian. An Unravelling by Elske Rahill is published by Head of Zeus (RRP £18.99) To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
