This book. This magnificent book.

The Alternatives by Caoilinn Hughes is the story of the Flattery sisters, who were plunged prematurely into adulthood when their parents died in tragic circumstances.

Various relatives moved in and out, looking after them in shifts. This angered and confused the girls, who resisted management, who preferred unsupervised sadness.

The eldest, Olwen, takes over, doing her best to guide the younger three, but ultimately they all find their own way forward and when the novel opens, the sisters are in their thirties and excelling in their chosen careers.

Scatter-brained Olwen is a geology professor in Galway, preoccupied with climate change; Rhona, focused and ruthless, is a political commentator, and teaches political science at Trinity in Dublin, all with her one-year-old son, Leo, tucked under her arm; gentle and creative Maeve is a chef, who found success via social media, and is now stuck catering ritzy dinner parties in London’s Notting Hill; and Nell is a philosophy professor in America, who would be on track for tenure if she was more ‘…into playing the game, into academic-capitalist compliance‘.

“I have three sisters. They all have PhDs. Olwen says its Bayesian statistics, is all.” Mrs Charles is incredulous. Four Irish sisters…all with PhDs? “And none with husbands!” Maeve says this tongue-in-cheek but immediately regrets it. It is both too rude a parody of Mrs Charles’s intonation and ambitions for women other than herself…and a nauseating, friendly-rapscallion bit of self-sacrifice that will only intensify Mrs Charles’s endearment towards the heretical Irish.

The sisters lead disparate lives and contact between them is sporadic, until Olwen ‘vanishes’. The sisters descend on the Irish countryside in search of her (this is not a mystery novel, and it’s not a spoiler to reveal that they find her early in the story). Their time together forces them to face both their past and the uncertain future.

I loved everything about this book but those kind of statements aren’t helpful to other readers, so I’ll try to be a little more discerning.

First and foremost, the dry humour (and the humour is ultimately what made me cry in one of the closing scenes). It’s difficult to quote funny bits because Hughes has created each character with such care and attention to detail, that what they do and say is intrinsically funny. I do not underestimate the skill that it takes to create characters that you feel you know.

I’ve never heard the word vegan uttered from anywhere other than a high horse.

Secondly, Hughes has delivered a novel about climate change, without actually saying ‘climate change’. Olwen talks about it in the context of Earth’s long history (and how in the past few decades, we’ve accelerated destruction); Rhona treats it as a political issue (and meanwhile is ensuring that a seawall protecting her coastal home gets paid for by the local government); Maeve’s agenda is sustainability and food security; and Nell encourages existential debate among her students. This varied approach allows readers to find their own point of connection. Olwen to her students –

Europe’s endemic forests took millennia to flourish. In five thousand years, we’ve destroyed ninety-nine percent of them. In Ireland, we want the full hundred. And Soil! Ye know soil? That’s been around for a while. Until we discovered the burger. We ruin a lot of soil to grow a burger. If we keep up our hijinks, we have fifty years of farming left.
[…] We’re Stone Age people still. We only have tooth-whitening kits and Duolingo to mark us out as modern.

Lastly, the structure of this book – it’s genius. It begins by shifting perspectives between each of the sisters. When they come together, it is written as a play (acts, scenes, dialogue and actions). The change in pace and energy is obvious but what is really clever is that by the time the sisters meet, you’re anticipating what they’ll be like in each other’s company.

The structure also allows for quiet, reflective moments – there’s silences and space. I’m not quite sure how Hughes achieved this, and as I write it doesn’t make much sense, but in the same way that I anticipated the interactions of sisters, I also felt the silences, the moments where they would look at each other before speaking, or sense the heaviness of a sigh or a shoulder slump. None of this stuff is written but it is there because the characters have been meticulously crafted.

And an extra special mention for Leo, who doesn’t say anything but is a master of silences, facial expressions, and timing.

When she turns, her gaze goes straight to Leo. He was barely three months old when she last saw him; now he’s nearly one. He discerns that his role is to be quietly magnificent.

When I saw Hughes speak a few weeks ago, she said that this is a book about care. And again, she explores this theme differently through each character – Nell delves into Heidegger’s concept of care; Maeve cooks; Rhona musters resources. And Olwen is pure-Olwen, bringing her big-sister-energy to everything.

Our father cared profusely…but you can be shit at caring.

It’s rare that I finish a book and immediately want to turn to the first page again, but this is one of those books.

I received my copy of The Alternatives from the publisher, Oneworld Publications, via NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.

5/5

Her throat contracts at the cold gin as she pours it. Frozen rhubarb cracks and thickens in the glass…

As part of the 20 Books of Summer reading challenge, I’m comparing the Belfast summer and Melburnian winter. The results for the day I finished this book (August 5): Belfast 10°-17° and Melbourne 6°-15°.