Big Girl Small Town by Michelle Gallen

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Despite being descended from the “noblest clan in Ireland” and former rulers of Ulster, Majella takes little pride in her family heritage. Before disappearing, her father tells her the O’Neills have “brains to burn.” As well as a “history of smuggling,” they’ve “dodged the law on both sides of the border.” Unmarried at twenty-six, Majella seems to be the last of the clan.

Sometimes she thinks it would be nice to to marry and raise a crowd of “weans,” or even to have a fella who is willing to rub skin cream on her. Finding no such candidate in her home town of Aghybogey, she stays on with her alcoholic mother.

Working her steady job at the local chipper, “A Salt and Battered,” Majella serves a repetitive sequence of fish suppers, sausage suppers, Daddy burgers, and curry chip peas, accompanied by oceans of Coke and Sprite, and occasional glasses of milk. A few customers are “Prods” having a change from the “Cod Father” on their own side of town.

Calm and kind to her moody mother, Majella sidesteps Mammy’s attempts to manipulate her. Nor does she let others take advantage. A long-time veteran of teasing, bullying and worse, she has learned to counter nosiness, rudeness and other unacceptable behaviour by using her “blank face,” long refined for the purpose.

In spite of her limitations and circumstances, Majella has created a good life for herself. She likes her work, and gets on with her co-workers. She enjoys her favourite foods, eaten according to her own rituals. On days off, she enjoys a pint or two of Smithwick’s in the pub. She also manages a reasonably satisfying sex life. Although “Other people” feature on her list of stuff she’s “not keen on,” she has friends, and is able to enjoy and learn from them on her own terms.

The language replicates Northern Irish speech patterns in a way that makes us feel we’re there. With Majella, we ponder the illogic of expressions such as “odd as two left feet.” Practically everybody in Arghybodey drinks, and many routinely get drunk. To vary the descriptions, we’re provided with a couple of dozen of local synonyms: blootered, langered, lashed, pished and stocious, to name but a few.

One of the things that irritates Majella is the way society routinely drives people to lie and pretend. She doesn’t understand why they can’t be more straightforward. The finer points of Prod versus Taig politics also escape her, since “this stuff wasn’t covered in history class and everyone spoke about it in mutters while looking sideways as if they were under surveillance.”

Through Majella’s unflinching gaze, readers see the chilling effects politics has had on every aspect of life in her small town near the border of the Republic of Ireland. With her childhood friend Tommy, she used to “ride out to her granny’s, criss-crossing the border, passing the barricades and skirting around craters.” Later, when Tommy is old enough to have a car, he takes her “right up to the border” and into the “haunted” forest. This is where the Brits “lost two men on patrol,” with five wounded. After the closed enquiry, the real story leaked out. The soldiers got spooked and started firing, and the IRA claimed the incident as a “successful republican assault,” even though “in the morgue the Brit coroner had dug only British bullets out of the soldiers’ backs.”

Readers also pick up other bits of Irish history, the 1607 Flight of the Earls as well as the IRA proxy bombings that happened in Majella’s time. As a teenager watching the news with her father on the BBC, UTV and RTE, she wonders about these faulty detonators, thinking about someone she knew who died when the detonator “prematurely triggered the bomb he’d been planting.”

When her father tells her proxy bombs have been used for years, she comments, “But before, we always gave the proxy the chance to get away.” He admits it’s “a dirty business,” and she nods to signal that she’s heard, even if from her point of view, “she didn’t really understand.”

In fact, she understands very well. “To her, the whole business of bombs and guns and beatings was a dirty business. The attacks and reprisals. The taking of sides and the waving of flags and the beating of drums. The statements and the refutements and the rumors and the verdicts.”

In spite of the underlying grimness of life in Majella’s town, this book is hilarious. Majella is a strong, fresh and bracing character. Her story is social satire at its biting best.

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