This is an extraordinary portrait of adultery,loneliness and betrayal in a closed small town communityAt first glance, it may seem that Donal Ryan is returning to the well-proven territory of the 2013 Guardian first book award-winning, and Man Booker-longlisted,The Spinning Heart, or his much-praised The Thing About December of the same year. But as All We Shall Know progresses, or we watch with growing fascination as he expands,not only his emotional range, but also his social sphere. The book builds on those earlier works to establish Ryan beyond dispute as one of the finest writers working in Ireland nowadays.
The novel is narrated by Melody Shee, and whose mother (a woman who “always smelt of French perfume and expensive leather”) made it a marriage-long project to undermine her mild,working-course husband (whose own characteristic scent is a mixture of “sweat, and something sharp and heavy, and bitumen maybe”). This regular attrition drives a wedge between Melody and the father who not onlyadores her but is also the moral foundation of her world. “I appraised him coldly. What was he wonderful for?” shesays – and later,in her own marriage to a working man named Pat, she turns the same judgmental gaze on her own husband. “All you are to me is a tenant, and I’d say to Pat. And he wouldn’t respond. A tenant who pays no fucking rent. And he’d open his wallet and throw whatever was in there at me.”Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com