"Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice Marianne is strange and friendless. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends, in 2017. “I gasped when I saw the cross,” she remembers and subsequently reflects, “He was the boy I had given birth to and he was more defenceless now than he had been then.” What follows the crucifixion gives a whole new dimension to the testament, for Mary and the reader alike.Ī young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up-sorry, can't tell you how it ends! “It was simply the end of something,” she says, and the claims of divinity leading up to it came from a son she barely knew: “his voice all false, and his tone all stilted, and I could not bear to hear him.” The miracle of Mary’s testament is that what might initially seem like blasphemy ultimately becomes transcendent, redemptive, even as she continues to resist “efforts to make simple sense of things which are not simple.” The testament encompasses the resurrection of Lazarus and the miracle of the wedding feast at Cana, both related in such a way that she neither denies what happened nor takes faith from them, and culminates in a crucifixion related in excruciating detail, from the perspective of a mother witnessing the execution of her earthly son.
She is a religious woman but not willing to cooperate with those who want to establish a new religion on the death of her son, the self-proclaimed “Son of God,” whose execution promises “a new life for the world.” No, to her, it was the death of a son for whom nothing could provide recompense. As the title suggests, the narrator is Mary, mother of Jesus, reflecting on her life and her son as she nears death.
A novella that builds to a provocative climax, one that is as spiritually profound as its prose is plainspoken.Īt the outset, the latest from the esteemed Irish author (Brooklyn, 2009, etc.) seems like a “high concept” breather from his longer, more complex fiction.
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