A Book Review by Frances Devlin-Glass
Claire Kilroy’, Soldier Sailor, Faber & Faber, London, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-571-37556-1
RRP: $24.99
In a culture that traditionally reveres Motherhood, it is significant to see new novels that deal with the grittier realities of mothering. This is the second novel by an Irish writer about the pummelling experience of the post-natal years that I’ve reviewed for Tinteán in two years. The earlier one was the very moving and more ambitious Doireann Ni Ghriofa’s, achingly moving A Ghost in the Throat, (2021), which interweaves the compelling story of Eibhlinn Dubh Ní Chonaill’s ‘Lament for Art O’Leary’ with her own story of nursing a baby alongside two toddlers.
Claire Kilroy’s Soldier Sailor is similar in many respects to Doireann Ni Ghriofa’s insofar as it covers the sheer drudgery and mind-numbing repetitiveness of domestic chores in their manifold forms and the effect new mothering may have on mental health, and in the way it charts the development of the child/mother bond. However, it differs in its focus on how the burden falls differentially on the male progenitor. She tells her son: ‘It’s so low, Sailor. The bar for men is set so low’. The issues she raises are urgent ones for young mothers, and although not new, they are critical in an era when both parents are likely to need to be working, and the demands of early childhood are so excruciatingly unrelenting and chaotic, exacerbated by a depth of tiredness that is rarely replicated in ‘normal’ life circumstances.
The novel is an often enraged (but loving) monologue addressed to her son, Sailor, by a female narrator, a mother, who styles herself Soldier. The terminology tells its own story, of men’s freedoms in the world and of the embattled female foot soldier, constantly outraged, not to say maddened, by the unequal burdens placed on her. Getting to Easter with its hopes of a break in the runs of sleep-deprived nights, she yearns for respite which is not forthcoming and it breeds a galling resentment as she comes to the conclusion over and over again that she is no longer a focus in his life as he seeks diversions to minimise his need to pay attention to his son, and contemplates divorce, to the shock of his wife. What the novel does so well is to place the reader in a zone where the adults in the room are totally shocked by the change of lifestyle occasioned by a tiny baby. In Kilroy’s novel, it is represented as requiring a seismic reorganisation of an existing relationship. Together they are catapulted into ‘unplumbed reservoirs of hate’ (p.9), often based in envy as a result of differing expectations placed on women and men in relation to the demanding child.
One of the heartening aspects of this novel is that it does not demonise men, and although the husband is less than useful as a father (choosing work over home at Easter when she’s looking for some sharing of parenting), she does meet a different kind of male. The unnamed house-husband, with four somewhat older children, is dealing with similar challenges. He can empathise and point the way, by being and doing rather than preaching, to a calmer future as a parent. Solidarity at crucial points lessens her anguished isolation, and coincidentally smashes the gender divide on the matter of child-rearing, as his family is orderly and the man has learnt how to build calm in the midst of family chaos and competing demands. It’s a strong and hopeful case for a new gender norm: metrosexuality and men more commonly rearing children.
I’ve done a very unscientific straw poll with my friends, asking them what they remember of their earliest parenting experience. To a woman (and a handful of men), all reported that it was etched in their minds, never to be erased, vividly in memory, even though they were overtired and considered they were not managing well at all. The clarity of memories, sometimes decades later surprised me and chimed with my own experience.
One wonders how the baby cannot know and feel the maelstrom that is the attending mother, and the novel often plays in this liminal territory filled with unspeakable desires to abandon or murder her child, or save him from her own madness, an act construed in her distress as an act of love.
The novel has its lighter moments: baby-socialisation featuring toys as projectiles and toys as potential world wars; talking to baby about his food choices while supermarketing; misadventures with faeces; messing with Play-Doh and Kinetic Sand in the high-chair tray and short attention spans; becoming a Dancing Bear in response to the child’s screeches; buying a child-sized bed at IKEA and getting separated from the child; Toad of Toad Hall and the contest for right-of-way on a pavement for mother and child in stroller on a narrow footpath; and, inevitably, inane tricks for coaxing an unwilling eater to consume the extra tea-spoon. Those who bring order and safety into these quotidian moments of a young child’s life, it seems, earn their warrior status in a woman’s world, even if the men who are in their orbit don’t have a clue.
This is the kind of book I’d have devoured as a first-time and very bewildered mother navigating the new regime of extreme highs and lows of mother-love. However, one would have to choose one’s mark if gifting this novel to a new mother, and she would need to be an intimate and perhaps open to discussion. It’s compelling, disturbing, and makes much sense of postnatal depression and lesser forms of baby-blues. In its individualistic way, it is surprisingly hopeful, as the monologue is, finally, a lovesong to a small boy.
Frances Devlin-Glass
Frances taught Literary Studies at Deakin University, and still teaches. She is a member of the Tinteán editorial collective.
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