Customer Reviews

The Bray House

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Much of the Irish folklorist Ní Duibhne's fiction incorporates her academic training and her adaptation of archetypal story elements into contemporary settings. In her short stories, this seems to work better than her longer works--where such ingredients tend to melt into the larger blend of feminism, social critique, psychological exploration, and relationships that serve as her interests. Her work, in my opinion, as with much speculative fiction, has better ideas than polished plots or entirely believable, fully rounded characters.

That said, "The Bray House" has its moments of inspiration. The whole set-up, from a book written in 1990, unfortunately seems more relevant than ever: global warming and ecological disasters push many nations into choosing nuclear energy to keep their consumer economies going. A series of reactor explosions accidently set off makes Ireland a wasteland in perpetual ash and desolation, like Pompeii without the casts of human figures in the ruins. Most of Britain's destroyed; much of Western Europe has vanished underwater, as have most of the Americas; Africa fares not much better. Robin, a paleo-archeologist, returns to the former site of the beach resort town south of what was Dublin, in Bray, for an excavation. With her are a cranky assistant, Karen, and a two eccentric volunteers, Karl & Jenny. They're all from Sweden, whose wise environmental stewardship, cautious mentality, and lucky climate enabled its cosseted citizens to survive the "Incident".

Robin writes a report on the house found in the digging, and her report's the centerpiece of the book, which becomes a post-mortem autopsy of sorts on what Irish late-20c life had become. Inequality between classes and degradation of the earth --as news clippings they unearth document-- characterize the Irish no less than any "advanced" culture; their own language and customs have nearly vanished except among a few pious elders. The ballyhooed rise of the Celtic Tiger followed the 1990 publication of this novel, so it may be rather dated in its economic grimness (if not in the continuingly widening gap between the greedy and the neglected) but for its ecological warnings, sadly each day brings these concerns in our real world ever closer to the near future that Robin and her crew come from.

What impedes such intellectual energy in this novel are long passages of endless recitals of Robin and her crew's earlier lives, none of which are very interesting although they seem to express Ní Dhuibhne's own experiences, filtered into fiction, of her own marriage to a Scandinavian scholar and her own perspective on Swedish and Irish societies in our time. This may be valuable in other contexts, but for fiction there's far too much rumination by Robin-- if this is her report, then it's doubtful that so much of it would have been given over to such semi-extraneous personal woes and family conflicts rather than the excavation itself-- which remains the heart of the tale even if it diverges stylistically in Robin's measured recital from the surrounding stretches of navel-gazing and reminiscence.

The climactic scenes could have been more exciting; the energy by this stage in the tale seems to have been nearly exhausted. While this diminished effort may reflect Robin and the crew's own weariness in such an inhospitable realm and their own psychic and physical estrangements, the impact of the last chapters dissipates into perfunctory told rather than persuasively readable chronicles of what the crew encounters and what they do with their discovery. I realize that Ní Dhuibhne wishes to make us regard the expedition differently than how Robin, the leader, wishes us as her audience to accept her leadership and her control. But the lackluster manner in which the last chapters unfold leaves the reader more enervated than exhilerated.

However, for the novel's imaginative power, its intermittently acerbic observations {of Karl & Karen's vapidity, Robin notes: "Youth is wasted on them; by the time people learn to make realistic choices, they are usually too old to have them."[52]), and its subtle reminders (to me) of the detached accounts of near-future women in harsh landscapes as told by 70s SF and imaginative writers such as James Tipton, Joanna Russ, and Ursula LeGuin, "The Bray House" has enough of value to merit attention, amidst its own dismally rendered scenarios.