By Juliette Hughes
FICTION
Nesting
Roisín O’Donnell
Scribner Australia, $34.99
“LTB” – leave the bastard. It’s a common response to posts on popular British internet parenting forum Mumsnet detailing domestic violence and/or coercive control.
Mumsnet is a treasure chest, a guilty pleasure to doom-scroll, but however you view the site, many of the women posting there could nod in recognition when reading Nesting, the debut novel from Irish writer Roisín O’Donnell.
Ciara, her protagonist, is married to the confident and charming Ryan, who never actually hits her but has cowed her with a combination of love-bombing and mood swings, breaking down her sense of self and isolating her from friends and family.
Despite Mumsnet’s advice, leaving coercive partners is the hardest thing women can do, and O’Donnell makes this clear and understandable by tracking Ciara’s thoughts and impressions with prose that is precise about sensory experience.
The story begins as she is making tentative, terrified plans to accumulate enough money to go. Her daughters are four and two, and she is hoarding the money he gave her to buy them wetsuits for a beach daytrip, squeezing their little bodies into outgrown ones. Afterwards, she must weather the fury and contempt he loads on her for it, trying to plead and deflect, to appease and propitiate. His violence, even though directed at a chair, a cup, a slammed door, has her on eggshells all the time; the implicit threat against her is always there.
After a five-year marriage, Ciara is like a cult inmate whenever she tries to leave. Her books are stored in boxes in the garage – he doesn’t want her showing off her learning to visitors, not that they have any.
O’Donnell’s writing has a vivid, tactile complexity that reminds one that she is from Ireland, the land of Joyce and Yeats. As she puts her protagonist through a kind of purgatory, it is much more than a performative Picoult-style tract: Ciara’s thought processes and impressions have a strong, layered sense of verismo, the recognisable sense of a relatable human truth.
We see her as a broken, vulnerable prisoner; the emotional shackles that Ryan has placed on her have become internalised: “I cannot hear myself think. I do not know who I am any more. I do not know if I exist. I feel like a ghost.”
Roisin O’Donnell has written award-winning short fiction; Nesting is her first novel.Credit: Ruth Medjber
When she finally makes a break for it, she still allows herself to be cozened by him into revealing her intention to visit her mother in England. And of course, when she goes to the airport the following day, he has put a stop on the girls’ passports.
After that, she must navigate homelessness, a third pregnancy, the web of bureaucracies that daily deal with broken people like herself, while fending off his endless texts, his relentless push to get her to return, enlisting his parents, quoting biblical tropes about submissive wifedom to her. As we see Ciara growing, strengthening, seeing some daylight again, we applaud the desperate courage in her.
If there is one small gap in the novel’s credibility, it is Ciara’s mother-in-law. Again, Mumsnet is replete with Gorgons preying on unfortunate wives of their sons and taking liberties with the children’s upbringing, but here it didn’t feel quite as contemporary as the rest of the book – more like something from the pietistic 1950s, a trope that runs close to cliche. Ireland in the 21st century is as progressive as any other eurozone member, and the Catholic Church has lost so much credibility that such a mother and son seem like museum specimens.
That aside, O’Donnell, even when we are having trouble suspending disbelief, is impressive in her ability to keep one reading. The sheer drama of Ciara’s gaslighting, abuse and coercion is something we are all aware of these days. It is completely understandable that the novelist wants to create a credible matrix that formed Ryan’s dysfunctional personality. In a story that could have deteriorated into misery memoir or agitprop tract, she facets the work carefully. We’re reminded of King Lear asking, “What makes these hard hearts?”
It doesn’t mean that the hard hearts get to escape her piercing insight; a man who love-bombs and then victimises his partner for the rest of their life together is a compelling villain, even as we wonder what chance he ever had to grow into a decent human being. Still, as Mumsnet would say: LTB.
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