F E AT U R E
THE TRAUMA OF POVERTY AND INCARCERATION EMER MARTIN’S 2018 NOVEL THE CRUELTY MEN TAKES READERS BACK TO A TIME WHEN THE IRISH CHURCH AND STATE HAD UNCONDITIONAL CONTROL OVER THE LIVES OF ORDINARY PEOPLE, BY EAMON MAHER
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close friend of mine had been singing the praises of the contemporary writer and artist Emer Martin (b. 1972) for a long time, which prompted me to read some of her Author Emer Martin fiction. I was not disappointed. Her first novel, Breakfast in Babylon, was published in 1995 and describes the experiences of a young Irish woman, Isolt, who escapes from the oppression and recession of 1980s Ireland and makes her way to Paris, where she lives as a down-andout with other immigrants, all of whom are addicted to drugs and/or alcohol. In a revealing self-reflective essay, Martin explains why she is attracted to marginal figures: “Often my characters are hungry ghosts entangled in a great web of trauma, but soothing and devouring themselves with addiction, as they wait for the spider to come.” The first line of the novel itself is quite striking, as the main protagonist and narrator declares: “I am not Jesus Christ. I left home younger than he, walked further and stayed out in the wilderness longer.” Martin explained that this opening line was “a challenge to the once-immutable religious power as defined by my experience being raised in a rigidly Catholic society.” I think this explains where Martin stands in relation to organised religion: she is wary of any group
of people, religious or otherwise, being given unconditional power over society. This aspect is wonderfully captured in Martin’s third novel, The Cruelty Men (2018). SENT AWAY The title comes from the name given to government representatives who went around the country trying to locate children who were born out of wedlock, or whose parents were deemed incapable of looking after them properly: single women who got pregnant, children who were found guilty of small misdemeanours or simply came from impoverished backgrounds. As a result of the close collusion between church and state, these people were sent to industrial schools, Magdalene Laundries or mother and child homes, where they were treated as though they were morally stained. Mary O’Conaill was the eldest child of a south-west Irishspeaking Kerry family, who were enticed with the gift of some land to relocate to the Meath Gaeltacht that was being established in an attempt to revive the national language. She and her siblings headed off with their father, leaving a heavily pregnant mother behind – the idea was that she would join them after giving birth to her baby – but they never saw her again. After a few months, not having heard any news of his wife, the father heads off to Kerry and he too disappears forever, leaving Mary with the task of raising her brothers and sisters on her own. She lives in daily fear of the cruelty men coming to take
the children into care but, by dint of much resourcefulness and backbreaking work, she manages to keep the family together, initially at least. When the eldest son, Seamus, takes control of the farm and the family, he arranges to have his brother Padraig sent to an industrial school where his strange mannerisms and inability to speak result in his ending up in a psychiatric unit. There he undergoes gruesome electro-therapy and eventually dies at a young age. The attractive Maeve, who goes to work in a shop in the nearby town of Trim, is pursued by many men, one of them the son of a wealthy farming family. Eventually she falls pregnant – it is not certain who the father is, as the son-in-law of the shopkeeper she works for regularly forces her to have sex with him also – and she ends up in a mother and baby home, a Magdalene Laundry and finally a mental home, where she suffers the same fate as her brother Padraig. Meanwhile Mary has to leave the family home because Seamus and his new bride, who is lazy to the core, make her life a living hell. She ends up as housekeeper and nanny to a lawyer and his wife, a teacher, also living in the area around Trim. CONTROL Mary is desperately saddened by her inability to keep the family together, as her mother had requested, but circumstances (and a strong bias against the poor) ensured that she could not do so. Her focus then becomes 35
