All We Shall Know
I love Donal Ryan’s work and can’t wait to read his latest, The Queen of Dirt Island. I lived in Ireland when The Spinning Heart and The Thing About December were published, and these will always be among my favorite books partly for the reason that they will transport me back to a specific era, a specific setting, a specific feeling…always. To me, they beckon like a gentle call of “remember this?” even though the setting, place, and politics aren’t really mine to claim.
With this one, though — All We Shall Know — there’s a lot to unpack. Melody is 33 and is pregnant by a teenaged Traveller who she’s been teaching to read. (The power dynamics are skewed not only by age, but by social class as Irish Travellers are similar to Gypsies in that they are historically nomadic and at the bottom socioeconomic rung and traditionally not held in high regard.) But Ryan weaves the subplots (Melody’s disintegrating marriage, a tragic outcome with her childhood best friend) very lucidly so that by the end all I’m thinking is that maybe it really is just human nature to constantly jostle with one another to come out ahead. And that this whole novel — just a slim one, as so many of his are — is a way of telling us that people might be terrible…but at least most of us recognize that about ourselves and that maybe the “best” of us are always on a journey to penance one way or another.
The settings and situations aren’t mine (and statistically speaking, not yours either), but Ryan always makes it so that even the most specific and “place in time” stories feel like something that could — maybe — make you think, “remember this?”
originally published on instagram