1 - Ireland – “Langrishe, go down” by Aidan Higgins, July 2013 (Score 5.9)


This story starts in 1937. From the first page I got a sense of good writing. The scene is well set. The unnamed “She” is sitting on a stifling bus, surrounded by the smells of people who have not washed or changed clothes for days, or are going home after an honest day’s labouring. The air is thick with cigarette and pipe smoke, something which we never have to suffer these days in public places.

The frequent repetition of text, extended or slightly modified, serves to increase our perception of the woman’s queasiness.

The woman is Helen Langrishe. We learn that she and her sisters Imogen and Lily, living in Langrishe House, are old – hair and teeth falling out. A fourth sister, Emily, is dead. The last paragraph on page 28 locates the house in the way that children put in their books – number, street, town, county, country, planet, solar system, ending with “The Universe”. Here it’s Leinster.

We get a feeling of the empty lives led by the sisters in their worn out clothes and there worn out house. It is late winter.

Higgins’ descriptive powers are excellent. We see everything which Helen sees, adding to our feeling of place. We learn from a cinema advert that these are the days when your cinema showed two films instead of the one we get today.

Their mother came from a cruel world in which she could evict a tenant family at any time, since the law was on the landlord’s side. Such a family could be left homeless and workless to fend for themselves, or starve. Helen has lived in this place all her life, but she clearly does not feel part of it. She is put out when she has to speak to one of the local people who have laboured on her family’s land for years. Helen’s family is now as poor as any of the tenants, clearly the tail end of a grand family, moving down in the world.

In chapter 8 the voice changes to first person, Helen thinking about Imogen, having been in Imogen’s room and read her letters.

Chapter 10 starts the back-story, in 1932, of Otto Beck and Imogen Langrishe. Imogen is 39. Beck is 35. The affair between these two is strange. What does she see in him? She doesn’t like him very much, and he treats her like dirt. Otto Beck is, I think, one of the most odious and self-centred men I have ever come across in literature. Higgins prepares us for the impending breakdown in their relationship. As Imogen’s thoughts tumble about, Higgins’ magnificently descriptive sentences break down into single words, or into short staccato phrases devoid of active verbs, having only gerunds.

Repetition of paragraph 3, page 240, and its expansion into paragraph 5 is interesting because this has happened on a number of occasions throughout the book.

There is a spot of bathetic humour near the end, when we have moved forward to 1938. Helen is being buried. Her grave has been dug deep enough, wide enough, but not long enough and the coffin gets stuck at an angle with the gravediggers struggling to get it back out so they can lengthen the grave. We have to imagine poor Helen’s body being tipped to the downward end.

I didn’t particularly enjoy the story but, because of Higgins’ immaculate use of language, I scored the book at 7.5. I recommend that any reader leaves John Banville’s excellent Afterword until finishing the book, as is intended.