ORDINARY HUMAN FAILINGS, by Megan Nolan
Tom Hargreaves can’t believe his luck when he stumbles on a drama playing out in the courtyard of a South London housing estate. Three-year-old Mia Enright, the child of a respectable local couple, has disappeared, and even before her body is found the residents know who’s to blame: Lucy Green, a feral 10-year-old from “a family of misanthropic Irish degenerates.”
Though he is careful not to reveal this to the gossips of Skyler Square, Tom is a reporter on The Daily Herald. It’s 1990 and the British tabloid agenda is dominated by sensationalism and gutter tactics. Covertly recording the locals’ speculation, sensing this might be the big break he needs, Tom imagines the worst — a child murderer, or even a family of killers — and experiences “incredible, unthinkable joy.” His rapture is striking for its horror, and also because this is a novel where joy is in conspicuously short supply. On the rare occasions characters encounter it, the source is invariably compromised: stolen booze, perhaps, or the memory of a vicious prank.
When Tom’s editor learns about the case, he runs through possible journalistic angles: “Nineties Britain, the Battle of the Council Estate; feckless foreign wanderers with a whiff of abuse and chaos turn on the Deserving Poor.” Tom is instructed to whisk Lucy’s mother, uncle and grandfather away from the tinderbox emotions of the neighborhood (and beyond the reach of his rivals) to a “safe house” where he’ll get them drunk and secure an exclusive. So, as Lucy is being questioned by the police, Tom is interviewing Carmel, Richie and John Green, topping up their glasses in a shabby hotel.
The story the Greens tell him is not the one he’s after. Tom hopes to unearth something lurid and appalling but finally has to admit the material has defeated him: “The vague darkness revealed to him by each member of the family held no narrative coherence when placed together, he could not get a grip on them.”
In “Ordinary Human Failings,” Megan Nolan, an Irish writer who is also the author of “Acts of Desperation” (2021), uses the framework of Tom’s interviews, along with police transcripts, doctors’ notes and Daily Herald editorials, to explore the sad, cramped histories of Lucy and her family, characters with lives as small and hard as gravel. It’s a novel that resists the obvious and, though we are shown the Greens fleeing Waterford, in Ireland, for London in 1978 because of an unwanted pregnancy (resulting in Lucy’s birth), there are few explicit references to religion or politics. Instead, through a series of flashbacks and reveries, Nolan traces the “rot” that envelops the family to a legacy of emotional inarticulateness, a great failure of communication: one unspoken trauma cascading into another, until a child dies.
Tom may not understand the answers, but his questions allow the Greens to engage with their own quiet tragedies (lost love, alcoholism, unemployment, neglect, mental illness) for the first time, which may be a turning point. If there is a weakness to this conceit, it’s that the internal voices of these trapped, inhibited characters are perhaps a little too similar: Carmel, Richie and John are each helpfully reflective and self-aware, adept at identifying the moments when the damage was done.
Toward the end of the novel, Carmel looks back on her interlude in the hotel as “a time and place that felt so sodden with misery and darkness.” That’s a fair description of the reader’s experience, too. Though the novel concludes — perhaps not entirely persuasively — on a note of hope, this fierce and relentless account of a family in crisis is almost unbearably bleak. Oh, and we never quite get to the bottom of exactly what happened to poor Mia. It may seem a heartless omission; but then again, this was never really her story.
ORDINARY HUMAN FAILINGS | By Megan Nolan | Little, Brown | 217 pp. | $27
