Books & Poetry

‘Grievance’, Marguerite Alexander’s first novel, is a dense and pretty bleak affair. Its heroine Nora Doyle, an undergraduate in London, has fled her unhappy childhood in Northern Ireland, where she was the de facto carer for her younger brother, Felix, who has Down’s syndrome. Their parents were ashamed and disgusted at Felix’s birth and, while he bonded with his sister, they found it difficult to recognise him as their son. Nora grew up a lonely child, desperate to escape her self-pitying mother and remote father, whose only pleasure was to hold court at the dinner table, inspired by the Daily Mail to increasingly extreme anti-British rhetoric.

Nora – painfully reserved – finds it impossible in London to cultivate the relationships she craves, and remains secretive about her background. Meanwhile, Steve, the star professor at her university, fixates on Nora, seeing in her a muse akin to James Joyce’s Nora Barnacle who will guide him through his mid-life crisis and writer’s block.
There’s a lot going on in this book – too much, perhaps. Switching between Nora’s present life in London and her past in Ballypierce, too many pages rather awkwardly tackle the twin themes of Irish literature (discussed at length in Steve’s seminars) and Northern Ireland’s political situation (in the discussions to which Gerald forced Nora to contribute). Alexander writes much more fluently when she focuses on her main characters; her affectionate but unsentimental portrayal of a child with Down’s syndrome is particularly well done. It is the very human portrait of the siblings Nora and Felix, and the misery inflicted on them by their parents, that really carries the book: their story is touching and, at times, very sad.