Have you no homes to go to? The line once used by Irish bar staff to clear a crowded pub at the end of an evening has a more unsettling ring in the modern age. What if you have no home to go to? What if you are not overly keen on going home? What if “home” gets defined by someone else and not by you?
Sarah Moss’s latest novel, Ripeness, is, among other things, an extended meditation on what home or belonging might mean in a period of disruption and displacement. The narrative shifts between 73-year-old Edith, who has settled in the Burren, and her 17-year-old self, who ends up in a villa near Lake Como dealing with her sister Lydie’s unwanted pregnancy.
Edith and Lydie are the daughters of a French Jewish mother married to a northern English farmer. Edith inherits from her father an acute sensitivity to the changing moods of the landscape and from her mother – lost in the aftershadow of the Holocaust – an innate scepticism about the permanence of any form of belonging.
Moss perfectly judges the prickly absolutism of the younger Edith, on her way to Oxford, a bookish teenager dealing with events in a foreign land that fast-track her to adulthood. Some of the most affecting pages in the novel describe the burgeoning sense of care she feels for her newborn nephew in the days before he is taken away for adoption, the carefully orchestrated outcome of the catastrophic circumstances surrounding his conception.
The older Edith memorably combines a clear-sighted forthrightness with the sarky petulance of advancing years (“we had a wireless at home but no record player, none of us feeling a need for music. It was only later that everyone started to have a taste in music, as if it were food or clothes, no opting out”).
As an English woman in Ireland, Edith is continually aware of the trip wires of reproach, the random observation that is chalked up to colonial condescension or the accent that potentially makes any critical comment a hostage to the high-horsiness of empire. Forty years of married life in south Dublin and her subsequent move to the west of Ireland make for a long apprenticeship in the unwritten codes of Irish social interaction, where she notes “friendliness isn’t friendship”.
Continually navigating the uncertainty of home and belonging is, as Sarah Moss’s beguiling tale reminds us, an important skill
Edith’s northern English plain-speaking continually runs aground on the island shores of the unsaid and the unspoken. Questions around assimilation and integration come to a head when Méabh, Edith’s closest friend, becomes involved in a local protest against the provision of accommodation for asylum seekers.
This event coincides with the imminent reunion between Méabh and a newly discovered half-brother from the United States, another victim of an unwanted teenage pregnancy, having many years earlier been spirited off to the US for adoption. Edith contrasts the ready acceptance of the half-brother – who has never set foot in Ireland – as being of the place, with the rejection of the young asylum seekers – who actually live on the island – as having no right to be there.
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Lying in bed with her German lover, Gunter, she wants “another immigrant to agree that national identity isn’t genetic, that blood doesn’t give you rights of ownership”. To an ageing Edith, the malign legacies of blood-and-soil thinking are evidence not only of the dangers of forgetting but also of the foreclosure of possibility, the denial that newcomers have the regenerative capacity to “belong by caring for people and places”.
Moss’s writing has always been characterised by its range, and the latest novel does not disappoint. Whether describing the shift of the northern Italian landscape from summer to autumn, the granular changes of light on a wet day in Clare, or the brittle exchanges between two damaged siblings, Moss’s prose is unfailingly spare and alert.
The images are often arresting: “a bowl of brassy dimpled pears”. Equally, they are telling in their unfussy accuracy, such as when she evokes spring in the Burren, “its tiny flowering in the crevices and rain-cups of sedimentary rock, in the pinprick markings of the planet’s bone”.
Part of the attraction of this captivating novel is Moss’s curiosity about different ways of knowing. How the world looks through the lens of a different language – French or Italian, in this instance – and how you try to build another version of yourself in that language while foxed by the snares of grammar and idiom. Or how differently the world is felt and understood when it is measured out in steps, twists, turns and leaps, as is the case with Lydie and her ballet-dancer friends.
The ripeness of the title comes from Edith’s reading of King Lear. She contrasts Hamlet’s insistence on readiness, on the triumph of the will, with Edgar’s “ripeness is all”, which stresses how much is out of our hands, how much happens “regardless of agency or volition”.
Continually navigating the uncertainty of home and belonging is, as Sarah Moss’s beguiling tale reminds us, an important skill if, in our fractious age, last orders are not to give way to last rites.
Michael Cronin is Professor of French at Trinity College Dublin
