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"The
Fish in the Stone" is a gripping read. It's
extremely well crafted by Eamonn McGrath, author of
"Honour Thy Father" and "The Charnel
House".
However,
it's not for the faint hearted or the highly sensitive.
It brings home all to clearly the warped thinking of a
man who would rape his own daughter.
At
the beginning, the book appears a little clichéd, with
the mother's distaste for sex almost giving the husband
an excuse for seducing his daughter and for the
daughter's complicity.
It
seems too easy to blame everything on the stereo-typed
cold mother in a loveless home.
But
McGrath successfully turns all those excuses on their
heads and paints a true and horrifying portrait of the
misery of incest - bringing the book to a haunting and
terrible conclusion.
Most
shocking is the was the father deludes himself into
believing that what he is doing should be the norm and
the lengths to which he goes the preserve the daughter
as his lover.
Also
scary is the fact that both mother and daughter hide the
secret, because of fear of what others will think
because of his guilt. You keep wishing they'd be
stronger.
Sunday
Press
May 22 1994
A timely
look at an old taboo
THE
theme of incest has not figured large in Irish fiction,
but in his new novel, THE FISH IN THE STONE.
Eamonn McGrath tackles the subject head on.
for
most of its length, the narrative is restrained and
delicately wrought, but it ends in a climax of violence
and tragedy and aptly brings home the horror that such
activities beget.
The
story is set in a country town where James Ennis is a
prosperous shopkeeper. His marriage has turned loveless,
one of the main reasons being that his wife finds the
physical side of their union abhorrent.
His
son, Tom, has proved to be a disappointment to him and
has absconded, but his daughter, Mary, is the apple of
his eye and reminds him of a girl that he had a brief
affair with when he was young.
Soon
he finds himself drifting into the girl's room at the
night when his wife repulses him. At first, Mary
welcomes his advances, seeing them as no more than the
affections a father naturally bestows on his only
daughter. When push comes to shove, however, she finds
herself in a situation form which she is unable to
extricate herself.
Eamonn
McGrath is to be praised for dealing with such a
difficult topic, and for handling it in such an honest
and clear-sighted manner.
The
father is a monster, the mother ineffective, the girl
not completely blameless and the sad conclusion
inevitable. Not an easy read because of its content, but
possibly a necessary one.
NOTRE
DAME REVIEW
Spring 1995
Incest,
its a dirty little word that used to be a dirty little
secret - before it becane "trendy" to be a
survivor. So saturated are we with novels and short
stories and poems about this unspeakable sin that we
have forgotten how to be horrified by it. Nevertheless, The
Fish in the Stone, by Eamonn McGrath forces us to
remember how profoundly horrifying incest really is.
Set
in a small town in rural Ireland, the novel tells with
unrelenting candor, the tale of a father's seduction and
increasing brutalization of his daughter. James Ennis,
proprietor of the town grocery store and a seemingly
amiable man, is married to a deeply religious and
inhibited woman who despises him. They have a vibrant,
insecure daughter named Mary who inexplicably reminds
Ennis of the girl with whom he had his first sexual
encounter. In language both straightforward and
strangely dreamlike, McGrath uses the voices of these
three characters to give us a harrowing story of a
father's unholy lust and the terrible roll it ultimately
takes on the entire family.
This
novel deviates from other family abuse sagas in the
pitch to which the violence mounts, the slow crescendo
of nightmare. McGrath weaves the three primary voices
together to form a narrative that continuously tightens
and contracts. His forceful prose is lucid and
startling, filled at times with almost idyllic imagery
and at others with unflinching brutality. Thus what
starts out as guiltily titillating gradually
becomes something too gruesome to be fully absorbed. His
writing tolerates no compromise and offers no easy
solution, and as a result, The Fish in the Stone
becomes a powerful condemnation both of sexual abuse and
societal indifference to it.
Southern
Star
April 1994,
Eamonn
tackles taboo subject courageously
Sandra
Mac Liammoir is impressed by the way Eamonn McGrath
writes about incest in his latest novel.
The
terrible, passionate thrills of taboo sex and tangled,
mad love between a father and a daughter may be OK in a
gothic heathland bodice-ripper, but when some meticulous
writer like Eamonn McGrath gets into the head of the
abuser, as well as into the mind of the daughter the man
is having sex with, it can get rather uncomfortable.
That's
partly why agents and publishers flatly refused to
handle this book when Eamonn McGrath first wrote it
nearly ten years ago. Another reason is that it filled
agents with dread is the realism. The setting is deeply
ordinary - very small-town Ireland - and the characters
lead horribly boring, ordinary lives.
But,
discreetly illuminating their perceptions as they
develop and conceal an illicit relationship, it is the
madness-insanity, the touch of the obsessive warp, that
tints all realities. Above all, it resonates, in a
shockingly recognisable way, of the family.
It
wasn't the Irish who were refusing to consider the
script. The writer's London agent refused to consider
the script; another agent and a London publisher sent it
back unread. Incest - no thanks, was the message. Those
who did read it, queried the writer's devices.
HAVE
WORRIED
They
argued that, in reality, the girl would not have kept a
diary, that she would not have inhabited another
character during sex with her father. It worried them a
lot that the writer seemed to be identifying so closely
with the abuser, and coming up with such good excuses
for his making insistent regular demands on his
daughter. Some might even have worried about Eamonn's
motivation as well as his reputation.
He is
quietly relieved that Blackstaff in Belfast, the house
which published his two previous novels, have - at last
- taken it on. The Kilkenny rape case, and other things
we now know about the dynamic of incest, seem to have
validated many of the ideas in this book, but he was
still requested to tone it down a bit.
The
retired West Cork school teacher runs a hand through
snow white hair and shakes his big head. The gentle face
breaks into a slow open smile. "Ah, I don't
know", quietly explaining how he dreams it all up,
" I just sort of go into myself, and I write
whatever I bring up from there."
Eamonn
McGrath never goes out and does any research on
character. He'd rather not. he doesn't interview anyone
to find out what way they are likely to behave. He
spends as much time in his little study overlooking
Inchydoney beach as conscience will allow, and relies
totally on what he finds inside himself. Whatever comes
out, he just trusts it.
It
didn't matter to him that he was coming up with stuff
that nobody outside psychologist's rooms had heard of.
"I just thought that this was the way the
characters would behave," he says.
So,
Shopkeeper daddy comes into developing Mary's bedroom at
night and kisses her in a way she doesn't like. If she
pushes him away, he tells her she doesn't love him. Mary
loves her father.
Her
mother is obsessive about religion has a secret,
pathological horror of sex, and doesn't sleep with her
husband. Mary, like all daughters, is critical of her
mother.
she
hears them arguing all the time, and pities her father.
One night she wakes up "atingle with feeling,
swooning and drifting and pulsing through space."
The sensation in her left breast is the sleeping hand of
her father. Her confused, adolescent awakenings become
heightened by the dreadful excitement of the minute
seductions of her father's gradually increasing
affections.
THE
EROTIC BIT
That
is the erotic bit, and so is the first explosive, very
highly charged consensual consummation, which has built
up over time in both father and daughter. After that,
things get brutal and a young gauche boyfriend comes
along attempting to rescue Mary. The bitter harvest is
played out amongt them all, with many tears.
"It
makes rather desperate reading. I'm afraid,"
apologises the author, but he had to write it. The
intensity of his quietness and gentleness is one of the
astonishing traits of his own character.
He
listens carefully, and fully considers what other people
say, but there is a feeling about him, that nothing at
all could deflect him from what he has seen inside; that
nothing from outside has any power to overshadow or
illuminate those inner pathways he's chosen to inhabit.
There
is a story about his teaching days in Clonakilty that
another schoolmaster told me. Eamonn has always been a
wearer of the bow tie. On day one, when he took up his
appointment and walked into the classroom of the boys'
college on the hill, the lads looked at the black bow
tie, and then at each other.
This
was not a run-of-the mill situation. The cheeky ones
thought happily that this new and unusual master might
provide their chance to have a little fun.
But
the giving of cheek never happened. There was something
about him that caught them immediately - call it a
reality, a genuineness, a call to their own realities,
or genuineness's - whatever it was, he made contact, and
he held them. His writings evoke equivalent allegiances.
As
far as his own community is concerned, this modest
writer seems to have won a respect which transcends
mundane non-literary considerations, like whether or not
anyone approves of whatever kind of subject matter he
might be putting under the microscope. Clonakilty people
have understood that a writer must write.
NEVER
SHIRKED
And
his writings have never shirked focusing on the
fundamental issues that all our personal lives.
"Honour Thy Father," his father novel about
his own childhood, details how a boy can "become a
liar with the cunning of an animal" and includes
intimate, detailed discussion of matters like shame,
anger and masturbation.
"The
Charnel House," his second novel, about
tuberculosis and sanitarium life., contains many many
poignant sexual longings of people who belong to the
fringes of society. Forbidden things are part of our
lives, but of course this novel is not just about sex,
or about incest. It is about people; people and the
thought processes that accompany any sort of behaviour,
and this include the aberrant.
I see
it as a brave attempt to understand and construct
something of the labyrinthine logic, which transforms
the true role of parenthood - the weird logic of the
loving father who becomes the sexual lover of his own
child.
That
seems to be what 'spooked' book people ten years ago,
and it may be that lesser writers might have left this
theme alone. Some might have wondered, in the act of
literary exploration, whether such dredgings-up might
have been coming from their own psyches, and felt
threatened. Breaching such dreadful taboos, even
mentally, may be considered best shunned.
Eamonn
is calm about all that aspect of it. He is a man with
grown sons and daughters of his own. Why did he write
it? He shakes his head. The theme occurred to him, and
it was in his nature of his business to explore it.
Writers are not crazy about explaining themselves. They
just do it.
But
in a way, you could call this book anything. It's a
study of guilt and innocence, if you like. Everyone is
guilty, just as everyone inhabits the logic of their own
innocence. And their is no guilt like a mother's guilt.
AT
HER DOOR?
"Could
the blame for everything be laid at her door? Confessors
were hard on women, she knew that from experience. It
was the duty of wives to accommodate their husbands.
Father Simon had told her she must return to her
husband's bed. That was easy for him to say. What did he
know of the degradation.?"
And
in the daughter's muddled head:
"How
had it started? that was what she kept wondering. At
some precise moment, something had happened.... the
thing was somebody's fault. She kept thinking it was
her's."
"Hurting
you is the last thing I want," says the brutal
father, after beating his daughter and sexuallt abusing
her. "But when you're like that, I do things I'm
sorry for. You should know me by now. You shouldn't
provoke me. it only happens when you're not honest with
me, and then I suffer for it. I'm suffering now, Don't
you know that?"
This
is a novel. But in real life, characters like this
father get away with employing such starkly flawed
logic, to justify in their own minds their systematic
abuse of children - even, or particularly, their own
children. This is a timely attempt to dissect and expose
the destructive dynamic of incest.
Typically,
her mother is no help to the young girl in the novel.
The horror of this, too, serves to remind us how very
possible it is for children to be oppressed in their own
homes, by their own parents.
THE
IRISH NEWS
Wednesday
April 6 1994
Story of
incest challenges morality myth
On Paper
By Owen
Kelly
If we
in Ireland have a fault - and I leave the question wide
open for facetious debate - It's a conviction that we
are somehow morally superior to other races, generally
on account of our ancient Christian traditions. This
chauvinistic concept doesn't stand up to close
examination and I can think of no better way to put it
into perspective than to read Eamonn McGrath's new
novel, The Fish in the Stone published yesterday
by Blackstaff at £6.99.
Put
at it's simplest, it's a story of incest, but events
unfold a narrative that's far from simple. Mary Ennis is
a teenager in a small Irish town, the daughter of a
successful businessman and his pious wife.
There
is an outward, lace-curtain respectability that makes
them chillingly identifiable as a type. The father -
referred to as "he" throughout - is a
hard-nosed and aggressive businessman who applies his
management style to his family. Mrs. Ennis devotes her
life to good works, each pious activity a denial of her
husband's demands. Mary Ennis is much closer to her
father than to her mother and when this closeness leads
to incest - ironically during her mother's absence on a
pilgrimage to Lourdes - there is a sense of
inevitability about it.
At
first there is an element of points-scoring against her
mother, but as time passes and Mrs. Ennis discovers
what's going on, the balance and direction of events
shift. Eamonn McGrath's carefully crafted prose carries
the story along so subtly and effectively that the
reader becomes immersed in the realism of the situation.
This
sense of reality is cleverly emphasised in imperceptible
ways, such a Mrs. Ennis's fleeting outrage that Mary is
on the pill, a revelation which for a moment is more
damning than the unnatural relationship with her father.
The
story draws inexorably to a tragic climax. Mary's
triumph give way to guilt and despair. Her efforts to
extricate herself from her doomed situation are
frustrated at every turn by the cunning, violent and
obsessive behaviour of her father and the general
ineffectiveness of her mother. The Fish in the Stone
- the title is a story in itself - will touch a
nerve in the social consciousness. Life is never as it
seems, nor as simple as it appears.
WEEKEND
April 23,
1994
Within a
dark secret
(By Jean
Kelly)
WHO
would have thought that it could about so
naturally?.....
Thus
thinks Ennis, after he has seduced his 15-year-old
daughter.
It is
a measure of Eamonn McGrath's skill as a storyteller
that he has built up the relationship in the Ennis
family - father, mother, daughter and missing son - so
subtly that when the incest first happens it does indeed
seem inevitable.... and natural.
The
Ennis marriage is loveless: man and woman seek their
separate ways to consolation. Hers leads to ever more
fervent piety and prayers, his to dependence on a loving
and responsive daughter. Both paths prove equally
dangerous.
This
harrowing book seems to lift the taboos of silence
surrounding incest. It is a difficult for fiction, but
the author has succeeded in writing a compelling story
that refuses to be put down. Repelled, but fascinated,
the reader is forced to continue peeping through the
respectable net curtains of the Ennis household.
The
author is not content, however, to depict an incestuous
relationship. He tries to answer some of the questions
that occur to 'normal' and 'natural' people when they
think about incest: Why does the abuser hurt someone he
loves? Above all, why doesn't the victim's mother
intervene, with outside help if necessary?
The
answers are complex and there can be no simple solutions
or facile compromises in a story like this. It is told
mainly from the viewpoint of the incest victim, Mary -
it is significant that neither adult Ennis is given a
Christian name - with occasional asides into her diary.
This
makes the chronology at the start of the book rather
difficult to follow - but once the story arrives in the
present it moves quickly and relentlessly to its obvious
climax.
Eamonn
McGrath examines in minute detail the mind of the
adolescent girl as she becomes equally the victim of
brutish father and cowed, conventional mother. He
explores courageously the intense emotional , spiritual
and physical relationship between her and her father.
The
book is not a comfortable or enjoyable read. There are
no snatches of humour to allow the reader think things
are not as awful as they really are; there is no
celebration of life. no happiness on any page; the dark
secret is all-enveloping.
But
it is a necessary book; Kilkenny has taught us that.
THE
SUNDAY TIMES
1 May 1994
At
first sight; Eamonn McGrath's The Fish in the Stone
(Blackstaff £6.99) belongs to a different genre: the
tale of absorbed and ultimately tragic southern Irish
life, as practiced by a writer such as Patrick McGinley.
Despite the access of guns and sectarianism, much of the
psychological baggage endures. Scarred by his loveless ,
and captivated by the bucolic frenzies of his youth, an
emotionally damaged shopkeeper becomes obsessed with his
teenage daughter. The account of their incestuous
relationship, seen from both sides, is convincingly
outlined, a succession of tiny steps instinctively
taken, probable consequences cancelled out by the
naivety and psychosis. McGrath's conclusion - a tumult
of violence and implausibility - is overdone, but there
is a great deal of shrewd observation and delicate
writing along the way.
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