\u201cIt all\u201d is the long tail of trauma, to put it simply. In Grand we met McCarthy\u2019s brilliant, hard, funny, kind, mean, wonderful, alcoholic Mammy Carol, and god I couldn\u2019t get enough of her. In Stakes we get to go back and visit her again. Are two books even enough for such a person? When you read Carol you can see, hear, why McCarthy must write her, pour two books out in relatively quick succession. Memoir is an opportunity to raise the dead: resurrect them on the page and let them speak. It\u2019s also a chance to turn those voices up, strain to listen to what they never quite said, or said when you weren\u2019t in a position to listen. Assembling memories alongside the determined, conscious immediacy of putting one word in front of another is the privilege of being left behind bearing the wounds your ghosts have handed to you. The mission of Stakes, where the urgency comes from, is the confronting of those wounds \u2013 peering in, analysing the shape of them, the precise nature of their pain and opportunity.<\/p>\n
Stakes at Whitby Abbey; and a signed copy of Dracula in the Abbey\u2019s museum.<\/p>\n
Published at almost exactly the same time as Stakes is Said The Dead, by Irish writer Doireann N\u00ed Ghr\u00edofa. Said The Dead is a shapeshifter that blends fiction, research and memoir to tell the story of the patients of Cork Mental Asylum, known as Our Lady\u2019s, the same asylum where Carol worked as a nurse. As the Abbey towers over Whitby, so Our Lady\u2019s looms over McCarthy\u2019s family, her Cork: \u201cthe power that place has always had, to mix up time and space \u2026 Grey stone walls and Gothic arches like witches\u2019 hats, a tangle of stairs and floors and corridors. Like an Escher painting, Mammy in the centre.\u201d<\/p>\n
We visit and revisit Our Lady\u2019s throughout Stakes at different times \u2013 a storied, scary place, an institution, then a ruin, then flash new apartments with a spa. It\u2019s a site of violence against patients and against Carol. The violence reverberates out of Carol and down through McCarthy following her to New Zealand and back to Cork and into motherhood and onto the pages we\u2019re reading and beyond.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Both Stakes and N\u00ed Ghr\u00edofa\u2019s Said The Dead are part of a growing collection of literary work by Irish writers reckoning with a trauma both collective and individual: Claire Keegan, Audrey Magee, Michael Magee, Anna Burns, Elaine Feeney, many more. McCarthy\u2019s approach is through the lens of herself, the quickness of her mind, the close reader, the astonishing kaleidoscope of her memory, her rage, her grief. N\u00ed Ghr\u00edofa\u2019s way is to haunt backwards, slipping herself as \u201cthe Reader\u201d into the hospital\u2019s casebooks, hiding there, witnessing but not interrupting. Through their work, footsteps laid down word by word, the horrors clamouring to get out all these years come finally loose, turning towards the searchlight of the writer who is pained and angry and compassionate enough to hunt for them.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Our Lady\u2019s, Cork (Photo: Richard Fensome, Wikicommons)<\/p>\n
But what do you do once you know? Once you can see? What if there are mirrors in the shadows? Some of the most moving passages in Stakes are when McCarthy is a new mother, a kind of horror in itself, and the Me Too movement is exploding in that other world, outside of the bed and the baby. Rage crackles on the page, and it\u2019s so fucking good to read it. \u201c\u2018All I\u2019m saying,\u2019 I grit out through my burning chest, \u2018is that it\u2019s fucking complicated.’\u201d<\/p>\n
McCarthy is talking to her husband John about consent, the definitions. Women know this conversation. McCarthy says it all: \u201cYou can consent without necessarily wanting to have sex. It isn\u2019t always some creep, holding you down, in a hotel or wherever\u2026\u201d. It\u2019s sickeningly familiar. It\u2019s a godsend to read a wife fight with her husband over it the way women do have to fight, even with the chosen, good ones. And the drink, too. Several times in Stakes I thought of the Mama Hooch case, of all the millions of women who are and have been made to feel like alcohol somehow eliminates their agency. It\u2019s enough to drive you to madness.\u00a0<\/p>\n
As well as vampires and madness and fear of death, particularly women\u2019s, I always thought Dracula was about writing. It\u2019s a novel in letters, journal entries, newspaper articles and all compiled and shaped by Mina with the \u201cman\u2019s brain\u201d so intelligent and resourceful. In the novel Mina is bitten, doomed to become a vampire, telepathically connected to Dracula, but is in the end freed from the bloody curse. With her freedom she makes literature, love and a baby. Mina \u2026 McCarthy. All great gothic literature pays attention to doubles.\u00a0<\/p>\n
When McCarthy gets sober, when the recurrent \u201cbright shards of pain\u201d (I winced every time \u2013 my 20s being a parade of mornings and days like this, feeling like shite with the only remedy being another night out) give way to AA meetings and daily runs down the tow path and newfound mental clarity, McCarthy is reborn as a writer. It\u2019s one of Stakes\u2019 great surprises to discover McCarthy was (is?) working on a novel about a woman obsessed with a vampire.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
The clues of someone with a lifelong attention to fiction are there, though. \u201cAt nine o\u2019clock every night, a tiny man comes out of the house in front of my cottage and locks the two big black gates at the bottom of the Rock Steps with a giant padlock, like something from the Brothers Grimm.\u201d And just down the page a bit: \u201cI have a vision of myself going out in my pajamas in the middle of the night, passing 20 Euro through the bar to my brother, like a scene from Midnight Express.\u201d Stakes is full of such comparisons: trying to land the truth of an unreal situation by calling on fiction. Stories, films, books are as powerful as memories. When you strike those moments in life that are slippery, uncanny, it\u2019s art that anchors. Here\u2019s a moment from the birth scene (of Eve, McCarthy\u2019s baby): \u201cDoctor Cat, the sheep on her surgical cap saying calmly, \u2018I\u2019m going to cut you now, or else you\u2019ll tear.\u2019 Bringing the scalpel down on me, a wicked little slice. Drugged, Pet Sematary came into my head.\u201d<\/p>\n
For the love of god please somebody programme these two writers together at a festival or something.<\/p>\n
When you think about it, life can only be surreal. Memories don\u2019t return in a linear way even as they\u2019re happening. There\u2019s always a double, triple, view: stories sliding into stories. McCarthy is an absolute master of the memory surreal. I read Stakes in the UK, on my own literary pilgrimage\/obsession for a novel that lives in my bones, and was both there and not there. At Whitby Abbey I was half wandering inside a novel about St Hild I\u2019d read only weeks earlier, and partially with Noelle McCarthy, and some part of me was trying to call up home because, as McCarthy says when she leaves John and Eve for Cork alone, home ceases to exist when you\u2019re not there. What is it like then to grow up in one country but live so much of life in another? In Stakes, Ireland and Aotearoa meld, like two blobs of oil sliding around each other with nothing in between.\u00a0<\/p>\n
At the end of Stakes, during the visit to Whitby Abbey, thoughts of bats give way to thoughts of kingfishers \u201cflying low over the stream that crosses the paddock. Past the cabbage trees.\u201d We\u2019re in Whitby and we\u2019re in McCarthy\u2019s home in Featherston; we\u2019re with the goths in Whitby committing to the bit; we\u2019re with Mammy who \u201ckept every card I ever sent \u2026 Every Christmas card and birthday card and every dumb no-reason card with New Zealand birds on it. T\u0171\u0129 and korimako, and little blue penguins.\u201d Time and space are slippery and can\u2019t be kept separate or quiet. \u201cGothic is the mode that contains the unspeakable. That contains titanic forces: life and death, good and evil. That mixes up time so it\u2019s never a straight line.\u201d<\/p>\n
With Grand, McCarthy announced her talent. With Stakes she\u2019s driving it home. Consider me bitten; another, truly brilliant, book enters the blood.<\/p>\n