Seeking and finding asylum
Nick Dent
UNHOLY GHOSTS by Ita Daly Bloomsbury, £14.99, pp. 224 You haven't got a very good memo- ry, Anto, but then being a psychiatrist you wouldn't have to, would you? It's only the loonies that have to remember, isn't it?'
Belle is the gardener at a Dublin mental hospital. Outwardly sane, intelligent, and somewhat outspoken, she nevertheless has a dark secret nestling somewhere in her past because she was once an inmate of the hospital herself. At the instigation of Anto, the head psychiatrist and Belle's former lover, she reluctantly begins to recall the events and people of her childhood and adolescence before her committal. These are the 'unholy ghosts' of the title.
If it sounds as though this is going to be much more demanding than Ita Daly's previous work, it isn't really. Despite the suggestion of psychoanalysis, Belle's recollections are just the mechanism by which the story unfolds. And Daly has the ability to recount a slightly depressing tale without making her readers too depressed.
Belle arrives in Ireland as a child after the war with her beautiful but ineffectual mother and dependable cigar-smoking grandmother as Jewish refugees. With the aid of their friend and sponsor, a reptilian priest called Father Jack, they set out to build a new life in the Dublin of the late 1940s. Belle's enquiries about their past in Germany are gently but firmly turned aside by her grandmother: Now, no more talk about the past. It is over. We have made a new life here for ourselves and you are the little Irish granddaughter.' The little Irish granddaughter, however, does not always conform to her grandmother's expecta- tions.
Through the medium of Belle's reminis- cences we learn of her metamorphosis from Jew to Catholic to revolutionary socialist. The world of the radical left in postwar Dublin, complete with its ironies and contradictions, is particularly well por- trayed. Belle's delicious social debut takes the form of an incongruous full-dress ball for members of the Socialist Workers Party. When Mona, Belle's schoolteacher and one of her political mentors, goes to Hungary in 1956 she is applauded by the left for going to fight for Marxism, by the right for going to fight against Marxism, and by the church for going to fight for Cardinal Mindszenty.
Occasionally things get a bit corny:
Max was my tutor, wakening me up in the body and mind. In the late afternoons, straight from school, I went to his rooms and we made love in his narrow, lumpy bed. Then over beans and toast (I don't remember any other food) we explored Marxist politics.
But for the most part Daly retains a sure touch. Unholy Ghosts has a strong plot, contain- ing one of the dramatic twists that are Daly's trademark. It is in many ways a powerful tale, although the writing some- how never catches the full force of it. Certainly, nothing like the pitch of feeling of the Hopkins sonnet quoted in the epigraph is ever attained in the novel. Daly's fluent, somewhat unmodulated style and cheerful matter-of-factness, for all their charm, are perhaps not the ideal vehicles for it.
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