I’m in awe of the last lines of Anakana Schofield’s Malarky. They offer an affirmation of life, despite the overwhelming incoherence experienced in the previous pages. When I came to them, I felt a reward of powerful clarity, an illuminating a-ha that mentally swept me back through this uniquely told story of madness and grief with heightened comprehension. “It’s beautiful when it all makes sense, so it is. Occasionally it makes sense, just for a moment.”
Malarky contains 20 episodes that in another book would be called chapters. They are the remembered events playing out inside the mind of a grieving widow who’s suffering a mental maelstrom, as she seeks insight into her husband’s infidelity, her son’s homosexuality and events leading up to their deaths. Her name is Philomena, and she is our reckless, driven narrator occasionally referred to as “Our Woman,” a compelling and unforgettable Irish cattle farmer’s widow, who cleverly dominates the page and consumes us. When the book opens, she’s in counseling with Grief, the name she gives her therapist. Her remarks frighten Grief and concern Philomena’s friends because they’re filled with desires inappropriate for a widow. Her recollections are fragmented, and that’s the point, entering us intimately and insistently into her interior world that becomes, for us, an absorbing journey into a mind swinging capriciously under the influence of guilt, confusion and loss.
Here’s where it all starts. Early in her life, Our Woman witnessed her son, Jimmy, engaged in sex with a boy in the family barn. When years later, home from college, Jimmy comes out to his mother, she tells him to keep his homosexuality to himself and hide it from his father, that at family functions “for your father’s sake, you’ll be alone or with a girl.” On this visit, however, she witnesses her son in another homosexual act, this time in the farm field, and feels disgust. She also fears being humiliated in their community of rural Mayo County, Ireland: “He’s done for. He must be gone from this country, this country where there is no forgiveness for such a thing.” But Jimmy feels no fear and flaunts his sexuality before his parents, causing his father to cut him off financially. He joins the military in America and is deployed to Iraq and then Afghanistan. Meanwhile, in a pub, Philomena is confronted by a woman who confesses having an affair with her husband and gives outlandish, explicit details.
It’s enough to drive any woman to a divorce lawyer or to make her flee into obscurity. Philomena’s response, however, is a bizarre opposite to revenge and denial, a kind of obsessive understanding for the husband and son she loves that’s as imaginative as it is inconceivable. She seeks out sexual experiences for herself to mimic those brought into her consciousness not only by her husband but her son. The erotic scenes – and there are several — are more desperate than sensual. They are infused with dark and quirky humor yet underlying them, also, is a kind of sorrow.
Often, Philomena speaks with Grief. Often, she comments on being unhinged, lacking reason and common sense. I have to admit occasionally getting lost in the narrative thread because of how she remembers things, once finding myself seeking the logical time sequence concerning Jimmy’s death by going back through some episodes. I couldn’t figure out for a while whether he died before or after his father died. I assumed it was as a soldier in Afghanistan, but I wasn’t sure. Even so, I knew the answers were here, that my challenge had to do with the inventive storytelling in which you can miss things if you don’t pay attention, where one must surrender to the sifting of events in a mind that swings out of linear time. It’s why I was drawn to keep reading and not put the book down, to stay with the rhythm inside Philomena’s head and on par with her thread of logic, not with what I expected.
And so it gets back to those last lines. When we reach them, everything comes full circle, especially regarding something Philomena says in the first episode: “If you are a widow, be careful what you say. I think it’s why they started talking about Jimmy in the bank.” You won’t know what that bank reference means when you first read it, but you will, eventually, and it’s a stunning construct. Indeed, it all makes sense within this crazy-sad theater of a grieving mind that’s a forceful showcase for such things in life. Schofield’s brilliant storytelling in Malarky is among the most engaging I’ve ever encountered.
The Longest Chapter 
I picked this book from the blog. Malarky sounded like it might be challenging, and I was looking for that, but then there was the main character. An Irish cattle farmer’s widow didn’t sound too interesting. After looking at a web page on Anakana Schofield, and seeing that she was a modern young Canadian woman, and reading that her mother still keeps cows and goats in Ireland, I was interested. Schofield had first hand knowledge of the character. The book promised to get deep and real into a woman’s thoughts and motivations. That’s an area where my understanding could use some improvement.
The first challenge was the Irish accent, phrasing, whatever you want to call it. After a period of careful reading, I found myself actually enjoying it. I’d love to hear the widow’s voice in an audio book. There were sentences that made no sense to me because the widow drops in Irish references (traveling woman, Quality Street, council house, Temple Bar, etc.) that I’d never heard of before. It helps to keep Google handy. Figuring out a sentence holds off that lost feeling. Also, all the named places are real. Map View and Street View help with the understanding. The things that Schofield does with the narrative/timeline are tricky but necessary. It’s like, “You’ll need to be turned upside-down a little bit to really get this.”
I wasn’t prepared for Philomena, the widow, the main character. Let’s just say that describing Philomena as deep, real, and believable is an understatement. Even with Schofield’s first hand information, I have no idea how she could put together someone as remarkable as Philomena. If there were a list of all the things Philomena did or went through in this novel, it would seem grotesquely strange. I wasn’t put off by any of it. Somehow it fits together. There is an understandable progression as the story goes along. It may not make sense to Philomena, but it made sense to me. I’ve never read anything quite like this book. It was great.
LikeLike
“Malarky” is indeed a great book. Between that and Lee Martin’s novel, sounds like you’re on a roll of interesting reading.
LikeLike