Customer Reviews

The Nature of Water and Air

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I was intrigued by this book, which is one of the reasons I bought it. It's a well written story about one woman's struggle to understand herself, her mother and life.

From the very opening of the book, when Clodagh says "My mother was never easy in the world of houses. She was a tinker, a traveler girl who had married a wealthy man. Her name was Agatha Sheehy...There are silences all around my mother's story.", you get an insight into Clodagh's personality too. While she is describing her mother's flighty ways, you get the feeling that Clodagh wants to have her mother be more attentive. At one point, Agatha tells Clodagh "you want to be in my skin with me" and you understand how close Clodagh really wants to be with her mother. A little further into the novel, you are with Clodagh as her mother commits suicide. From then on, the story is less about Agatha Sheehy and more about Clodagh Sheehy. From the trials of being a teenager going into puberty and learning about herself as a woman, to finding a man she is irrestitably attracted to, this book covers all aspects of relationships. Near the end, it took an unexpected turn that was not at all foreshadowed earlier in the book, so it was a good surprise. I was stunned, and then found myself hoping that it would change (and it did). It kept me on the edge of my chair until I had finished reading it. This story is surely one that will last and will have you thinking and re-thinking about your relationships.

Regina McBride has written a haunting novel. This is her first novel, and I'd have to say it is probably one of the better written ones I've read.

It is a beautifully written book with lyrical tones ~~ almost as if it was written to a tune of a piano. Some places are soft and gentle then it comes crashing down with the heavy tomes of truth and finishes with a clash of joy. It's not your typical reading.

Clodagh is a young woman who have spent the years of her life looking for something that was missing from her life. Her twin, Mare, died when she was a child. Agatha, her mother, was distant and aloof with Clodagh and Clodagh never felt that her mother loved her. So when Agatha died, Clodagh found her solace in music ~~ playing the piano. Only that didn't fulfill her for long and she falls in love with a man who somehow holds the clue to her mother's past.

Clodagh is a complex character ~~ you can't help but feel her anguish when she searches for what she is looking for. You can't help but admire her tenacity to hold onto life even at its darkest moments. She is a strong and yet weak character traveling between two worlds ~~ one of life and one of death.

This is an interesting book ~~ but don't expect it to be a light and fluffy read like my usual reads have been. It's full of dark underlying tones that makes you either uncomfortable or anxious to explore it. It was hard for me to keep reading on some pages because it was so dark ~~ depressing almost. But I can guarantee that you will want to finish this book and find out what has happened to Clodagh. She is a character that you will not soon forget.

4-29-02

Spanning the twenty years from 1960 to 1981, we enter the timeless magic of Ireland, a story that could take place now or in almost another century. Clodaugh Sheehy straddles two worlds, that of the genteel and that of the tinker (people sometimes referred to as Ireland's gypsies).

Even before Clodaugh's birth, events are set in motion that will determine her own destiny. Once Frank Sheehy, the frail- hearted father dies, Clodaugh's aunts can no longer abide his wife, the wild tinker woman, Agatha, and they banish her from the West of Ireland to their empy house on the eastern coast, where she gives birth to twin daughters, the feisty precocious Clodaugh, and a sickly sister, Mary, called Mare. Agatha likes pretty dresses and trinkets, but she also likes to roam near the sea and out in the fields, seeking the campfires and caravans of the tinkers she lived with as a girl until she met Frank Sheehy. Clodaugh and Mare are mostly left to their own devices except for the kindly care of a house servant, Mrs. O'Dare. At age five, Mare dies, and the distraught and lonely Clodaugh abandons for a time the piano they played together, feels Mare inside herself at times, and wants to cleave even more strongly to her mother. However, when Agatha walks into the sea for the last time, Clodaugh is now truly alone and has to grow up. She gives up her belief in ghosts and selkies, tries to forget Agatha and Mare, and attends the convent school, where she proves herself to be an accomplished musician on the piano. She goes on to win a prestigious award at college and her destiny seems secure and certain until the call of the tinker life and in particular, the chance meeting with a copper-haired man named Angus threatens to undermine everything.

Told in a straightforward, yet heartbreaking manner, part mythic, almost every line stirs with poetry, undoubtedly inspired by the Yeats which Angus quotes to Clodaugh, but probably also by the author's own poetic background, as well as the land itself, where sea and sky meet and one can almost imagine a woman who is half seal and half woman swimming on the tides. Amazingly, the story, saturated as it is with sentimentality, still manages to strike just the right tone and keep the reader's interest throughout.

The lure of the Irish tale weaves its way into the hearts and minds of even the Irish. The Nature of Water and Air paints a picture of the beauty of Ireland and its stories. One cannot resist reading further as the stage is set with ancient Irish lore interwoven with modern Ireland.

Clodagh, the narrator is a girl with a troubled life. Her situation is not ideal, and one forgets when this story is set. The timelessness of Irish folklore is evident in Clodagh's own story. Her life is shrouded in myth and confusion, secrecy and lies. A coming of age tale, with an entirely different setting-- this book will move you.

The nature of the Irish story is always mystery. The Nature of Water and Air definitely follows this idea. Clodagh is curious, she wants to understand her past, a past that is so secreted by her family. McBride manages to take tragedy and interweave it with Catholic culture, Pagan ritual, and Irish legend. The web created by this is an Irish story on all levels of Irish culture and history. Each step delving further into each, until one realizes it is truly the nature of water and air that drive the Irish tale.

McBride has a gift for creating despair. The prose she creates whisks you into a depressing, confusing life. However, even in the darkest of times, Clodagh perseveres and wades through her life with a true strength of character.

The Nature of Water and Air is truly a gift to be shared. A brilliant first novel for McBride and truly a great read. I look forward to reading many more by McBride.

This is one of the most moving novels I've read in some time -- and a difficult one to review without giving away the core of the story. Don't worry -- I'm not going to do that.

McBride's writing is like filigree -- incredibly detailed and delicate, filled with much more than it would seem the words on the pages could contain. The young woman at the center of the story, Clodagh Sheehy, is made as real as the water and air of the title -- and just as hard to hold. Her mother was a tinker -- one of the traveling people of Ireland -- described so aptly as 'never easy in the world of houses'. Clodagh is one of a pair of twin girls -- her sister, Mare, is sickly and weak, and is as much her other half as could be imagined. When she dies, and Clodagh's mother turns her love away from her surviving daughter, the young girl's world is rocked and crushed. Her life becomes a struggle to reclaim the love of her mother -- and to understand this dark, complicated woman, so different from all those around her. Her quest also has at its heart a yearning to know her father. It leads her away from the comforts of her home and into the world of the traveling people -- where things she never imagined are opened to her.

There is a gentle sadness that pervades Clodagh's story -- but it never becomes maudlin, and that is to the credit of this fine writer. There is also great beauty and mystery in abundance here -- told in shimmering prose that makes the Irish landscape and culture come alive for us. This book is a treasure chest filled with life and wisdom. An old tinker woman -- a character who appears only briefly toward the end of the story, says it well: 'Buadhann an thoighde ar an gcinneamhain' -- 'Patience conquers destiny'.

One of those wonderful novels which falls somewhere between stark realism and edgy fantasy. It's told in the voice of Clodagh, a young Irish girl whose strange, wild-spirited tinker mother may or may not have been of the seal folk. The wealthy relatives of Clodagh's deceased father don't know what to do with the odd Agatha and her two daughters, and ship them off to a decaying family house in the east. Clodagh's twin sister, never strong, dies young, though her spirit seems to live on in the demi-twilight shadow-world of Clodagh's relationship with her mother, their rough but loving housekeeper, her teachers, the development of her remarkable musical gifts, her fascination with the travelling tinker folk, her seeking after something more, something better... Eerieness and otherness are never quite distant, never fully embodied, always hovering, never alighting---something of a metaphor for the way in which Clodagh engages life, I suppose. But when she does embrace the living, she embraces with a strong will and without looking back...

Really a lovely book. Unafraid of looking at the grit of modern Irish life, unashamed of the half-imagined touch of magic and myth. I enjoyed it very much.

Regina McBride, The Nature of Water and Air (Simon and Schuster, 2001)

Wow.

Okay, now that my first impressions are out of the way, this is one hell of a ride. All the more so because most books that have that effect on me are your typical big budget thrillers that, were they to go to the big screen, would be directed by John McTiernan or someone along those lines who uses a lot of pyrotechnics. The Nature of Water and Air is anything but; stuff doesn't blow up here at all. In fact, it tends to do quite the opposite; characters implode on a fairly regular basis, but they do so within the context of a pervasive atmosphere that this is the way things are supposed to be. It's hard to explain why something that's so low-key can have such an effect, but I'll give it a go.

Everything that makes this book work is atmosphere-- big old houses that are falling apart, characters for whom clinical depression means things are looking up, Catholic schools harboring reclusive nuns, it all adds up to an unshakable feeling that not only is something bad bound to happen, but that everything that's bound to happen is bad. It's the revival of classic tragedy--bad things happen not because of the flaws in the characters (and there are certainly character flaws aplenty), but because the gods have deemed that, for these folks, the dice came up snake eyes again and again, no matter how many chances they got. And yet still, when bad things happen to these people (be they good or not so good), every once in a while the way in which the bad things happen, or the scope of the bad things that do happen, is carried off so brilliantly that it might as well be the roof of the Nakatomi Plaza being blown to bits in Die Hard. Enchanting.

The story centers around Clodagh Sheehy and her mother, Agatha. Clodagh's father has been dead for most of her life, and she has no memory of him. She has a twin sister, Margaret Mary, who's too frail to do much other than play the piano once in a while. To top it all off, she's convinced that her mother is a selkie, a seal taken human form who is destined to return to the sea at some point. Agatha married into the Sheehy family, and is not beloved of the rest of her husband's family, so they send her to the other side of Ireland to live in a decrepit mansion the family still owns over there. Mrs. O'Dare, one of the housekeepers, comes along for the ride, and it is there our story opens. Most of the action goes forward through the reader finding out more and more about Clodagh's family (the unraveling of her mother's mysterious origins, the relationships between Agatha's husband and his sisters, etc.), but there is also Clodagh's growing up; the book takes place over the span ow twenty years. from Clodagh's girlhood until just after her twenty-first birthday.

It is an uncompromisingly dark novel, one for which the word "bleak" is too light and airy. And yet it never fails to be beautiful. ****

As dense with fable and mystery as the Irish coast, this is the work of a poet whose images are cast in the clothes of her luminous prose. The recurring theme throughout is of love and death, the bonds of attachment and the anguish of loss. This tale is so seductive as to draw the reader ever closer to the line between mythology and truth, where life is divided between reality and the insistent song of the sea. "It seemed to be the nature of water and air, to be random, heartless". Not so, this novel.

Young Clodagh Sheehy lives in thrall of her distant mother, Agatha, who comes from the world of itinerant tinkers, and listens carefully to the call of this wild land where they live. Agatha's actions are shrouded with secrecy and full of sexual innuendo, and she drifts just beyond her daughter's knowing, unwilling to be trapped by the child's need and loneliness.

Clodagh's fragile twin sister, Mare, has died and the girl wills Mare to remain, if only as her other half, the opposite coin of her identity. She plays the piano one-handed, leaving the other part, the other hand, for Mare, and sometimes stares into the cloudy mirror, hoping for a glimpse of her other self. Their father, Frank Sheehy, dies before the twin's birth, and Clodagh, in anguished desperation, clings to the only person remaining, her mother. But like the mythological selkie, half-seal, half-woman, Agatha returns to the depths of the sea, now lost as well. Cut adrift and friendless, but for a loving housekeeper, Clodagh begins a journey toward self-discovery, often tangled between the worlds of reality and superstition. In reaching out to identify the face of her mother, Clodagh discovers the truth of herself. Her adolescence is often painful and life changing, her passion for music frequently the only solace. Clodagh's dead father Frank, her possibly-alive real father, a tinker, and her early foray into sexuality are without satisfaction until she breaks free and claims herself.

McBride's novel is flooded with page after page of images. The vast canvas of such rugged, gorgeous geography serves as the background for dreams and emotions as tumultuous and changeable as the storm-tossed waves that beat along the coast. This author has accomplished more than storytelling, she has offered a glimpse of the true nature of Ireland, the very nature of water and air. Luan Gaines

Regina McBride has created a lyrical tale that explores the intimate relationship between inner and outer landscapes. The novel is set in Ireland and the descriptions of the land, climate, and surroundings are intense and vivid. Through the landscape, the reader observes how Clodaugh survives and grows to know herself and family of origin on many complex levels. Through the multidimensional characters, the reader can feel the angst growing throughout the novel.

The novel centres on Clodaugh Sheehy, an orphaned child with little sense of her past and future. The Nature of Water and Air, is Clodaugh's journey to discover herself and a family past that she desperately needs to reconcile. Clodagh sets out on a path where there is no looking back. As a reader, you will keep wishing things could have been different for her, but you will want the book to be exactly the same!

The novel is rich in culture, myth, symbolism, and Irish folklore. The writing is both beautiful and intense; one will get lost in both the words and story.

An amazing story by an amazing writer. I highly recommend this novel; it will surely evoke many emotions and great discussion. I look forward to future work by Regina McBride.

This book consumed me! I haven't read a book since Memoirs of a geisha that grabbed my attention the way this did. I can't stop thinking about it. The descriptions of Ireland put you there. You can smell the ocean, her description and detail are so intense. The feelings this book produces are so provocative and dangerous. Regina McBride is huge! Everything about the book was poetic. Can you tell I loved it!!?? And guess what? I never write reviews...