Reading Ireland: “Grace” by Paul Lynch

Literary Criticism, originally published in Reading Ireland

Though the poet W.B. Yeats didn’t pen the famous phrase “a terrible beauty” to describe Ireland until well after the years of the Famine, that line echoes and reverberates throughout Paul Lynch’s haunting and flinty 2017 novel of that tragic time period, Grace. With prose that is often indistinguishable from poetry, Lynch brings readers inside the unfathomable and wretched suffering of that time, but does so with such crystalline sharpness, using precise language and gorgeous imagery, that the beauty of his prose rubs off on the scene, adding a tiny glimmer of mercy and redemption to what is otherwise unbearable — though ‘redemption’ is probably too strong a word.

The tale opens when young teen Grace is snatched by her mother, Sarah, who roughly chops off Grace’s hair so that she will look like a boy. Sarah knows that if Grace sticks around much longer, the man who’s been impregnating Sarah and leaving her to fend for the “youngers” will soon be upon Grace. Meanwhile, the famine is sweeping the land. “You are the strong one now,” (5) Sarah tells Grace as she all but thrusts her upon the road to find her fate on the night of Samhain, the time when the dead roam the earth.    

Grace and her younger brother Colly take off into the larger world, unsure of what to look for, how to fend for themselves, trying to avoid the “pooka,” those spirits that are particularly free-roaming during Samhain, determined to simply stay alive, which in and of itself is a huge ask. Colly is a riddle-maker, a philosopher, fascinated by mechanics. Throughout, he taunts Grace with brainteasers. “Riddle me this. Which is faster, hot or cold?” (122) His questions provide one of the novel’s leitmotivs: How is it that people can suffer so and still keep going? What separates good from evil when otherwise good people are forced to do what they must to simply survive? Colly’s riddles, like these existential questions, remain unanswered.   

The plot takes the two through a series of mishaps and calamities – they join a booley (cattle drive) with the strange young man Soundpost who exclaims “Mercy! Mercy!” at every turn. Grace becomes known as a boy named Tim and in playing this role, loses an important fragment of herself. “The best part of you, she thinks, the part you have known all your life, has gone missing.” (50) It’s not just the name and gender change that have robbed her of herself, but the horrors of the Great Hunger. Grace sees Ireland as country on the brink of losing its soul. “If this were another time, she thinks, you would be asked the who and what of you. You would be offered straw and put beside the fire.” (51) Such hospitality is long gone.

Yet amid this suffering, Lynch limns the scenes with writing that is rich and deeply seasoned. Grace thinks, “what is happening to the county? She has seen an entire family hilled together with their belongings on a passing cart, rooted together in silence like some old tree gone to wither. Or the sight of a man under a faltering sun dragging two youngers on a sack, the children sloped like sleepers. How Colly went on about the man’s devil chin, that he was one of Satan’s helpers taking the youngers off to drink their blood and eat them whole to the toenails. How she had to shout at Colly that the children were being taken for burial.” (109)

Every so often, the suffering becomes too much and Grace wants to simply give up. “It is not that she wishes to be dead in a direct manner,” the narrator tells us. “It is that she wants to disappear without consequence to herself. To break from the tree like the autumn leaf. To fall the way dusk falls into its deeper colors without thought of its falling self. To drive from the self like the moment of sleep.” (52) As despair is about to take over, though, a moment of decency comes along, as when a woman gives her a piece of gingerbread. “It is like everything sweet on earth all at once.” (52)

Soon, the sweetness of that decency turns bitter as Grace recognizes the battle between the haves and the have-nots that has created her suffering. “…(S)he realizes the power of food this woman had over them and of a sudden she feels hateful. She would like to hurt that woman if she could. Take that fox stole from around her shoulders and wring her neck with it. Why are all these people standing in such wintering while she parades about in her fancy coach? It is only when she tastes salt on her lips does she realize she has been crying.” (53)

The plot puts Grace and Colley in alignment or conflict with others, all trying to survive, all who become part of the walking dead that populate the land, some of whom help, some hinder. There’s Bart, a young man with a shriveled arm who comes to Grace’s rescue, Blister, a man in the hayloft who files his teeth to points: “Look at my teeth as an example. You want to look more frightening than anybody else. That way trouble will take a look at you and run off.” (123-24) Grace is taken in by “Father” in a religious cult. Throughout, she remains able to see the beauty of the landscape, the way the mist hovers over the morning, and this sight is juxtaposed again and again against the naked awfulness of suffering that she sees with the same, though now painful, clarity. As the Hunger grows and Grace becomes increasingly desperate, she acknowledges that the laws governing what is acceptable and not acceptable are crumbling. In order to stay alive, she must trespass into foreign territory beyond morality. “…(B)ut what can you do, life has led you here.” (142)

Lynch’s prose is stunningly crisp and original, dense at times, requiring slow and careful reading to fully understand the details of plot, but to also spend a moment or two with the insightful and deep way he paints the world. Grace is the author’s third novel and it won the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year and was shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize and the William Saroyan International Prize. Lynch released a fourth novel, Beyond the Sea, in 2019.

Grace is a challenging read, not only because of its compressed and pressurized language, but because it asks readers to go into scenes that are unrelentingly bleak and heartbreaking. Were it not for that shimmer in Lynch’s prose, this would be simply too much to ask. But the reader, like Grace, keeps making her way through the pages, stopping to find the moments of transcendence that appear even amid the darkness nights.

Reading Grace is, in a way, like watching the searing film, “Schindler’s List” — something one must do to fully understand our history and the way humankind creates immeasurable suffering for each other. And yet, the experience of having seen clearly the terrors of such misery comes with a price. For good or for ill, one will never think of these historical events in quiet the same gauzy way again.