 |
| (Amazon UK link) |
I’m surprised to find that I have never previously read this book - or, at any rate, not in the past twenty-five years or so since I started cataloguing and reviewing my books. I’m not sure whether to class it as a novel or a set of short stories, because in a way it’s both. However each story builds somewhat on the earlier ones.
There are eight separate long chapters, each telling the story of one of the people who travels, every weekend, from Dublin to their home town of Rathdoon. The journey takes about three hours, and is not an official bus but a private arrangement with the driver, a young man called Tom.
The first section is about Nancy, a young woman who works as a receptionist for three doctors. She’s clearly good at her job, but not a particularly likeable person. We learn from her conversation, and other asides that she takes frugality to such an extreme that people think of her as rather mean.
She thinks she’s helping by telling everyone how they can eat more cheaply, or where they can find money-saving coupons. Although she’s earning a good salary, she seems to begrudge every penny she has to spend. Nancy has a few eye-opening moments during this particular weekend.
The next section looks at Dee, the doctor’s daughter in Rathdoon. In the first chapter it appeared that she was a kind, caring person as she sat next to Nancy on the bus, and listened to her talking at great length on many topics. But Dee has a secret, and something Nancy said makes her realise that her secret is not in fact what she thought….
Each section builds a little on the previous ones, enlarging on the knowledge we have already. There’s Mikey, who’s very good natured but annoys people by telling risque jokes. He travels back to stay with his brother and sister-in-law, and to help look after his very elderly father. There’s Kev, a rather nervous young man who turns out to have a secret life in Dublin which he’s very ashamed of, but sees no way out of. There’s Rupert, an upper-middle class academic who also has a secret of a very different kind, which he hasn’t been able to share with anyone.
Judy is the oldest of the passengers, a woman who works at a herbal ‘New Age’ shop in Dublin, but is afraid it’s going to fail. Nobody really knows why her husband left her, taking their two children, a couple of decades earlier. She assumes everyone knows, but in conversation she discovers that they don’t: so she admits what happened in the past, and then makes a rather risky decision about the future.
Celia, who likes to sit by Tom, is the daughter of the pub-owner in Rathdoon. She works as a nurse in Dublin and has some pleasant flatmates; but she can see that her mother is drinking too much. Her father died after being an alcoholic, and her siblings live around the world and can’t help. Celia feels as if she’s at her wits’ end, and knows she has to confront her mother somehow.
And Tom, who owns the bus, also has a life that none of the others know about. He observes them all, but doesn’t ask any questions.
Each of these eight characters comes alive in Maeve Binchy’s word pictures, and their interactions with other people. I thought it was very well written and a clever idea, even if it is a tad unlikely that all eight passengers on a regular bus would have secrets or pasts that they are keeping from everyone else. But that doesn’t matter; nor does the slight caricaturing of some of the minor characters.
A wide variety of situations are covered, and I found it a very readable, light novel (if that’s the correct word) with some mild humour here and there and some poignancy too. Not all the situations are fully resolved - that’s an issue I have with many of the short stories by this author - but at least some of them are partly sorted out by the end of the weekend.
Recommended if you enjoy Maeve Binchy’s writing, and if you like character-based books that examine several different slices of Irish life in the mid-1980s.
No comments:
Post a Comment