‘The Queen of Dirt Island’ by Donal Ryan (2023) – 242 pages

According to the author’s bio, author Donal Ryan is from Nenagh, County Tipperary, Ireland. His new novel ‘The Queen of Dirt Island’ takes place in a rural homestead near Nenagh.

There are four main characters in the novel, all of them female and each of them from a different generation. First there is great-grandmother Nana or Mary. Then there is her daughter-in-law Eileen. Then there is Eileen’s daughter Saoirse (don’t ask me to pronounce that name), and finally the very young daughter of Saoirse, Pearl.

Nana has some advice for her granddaughter Saoirse :

“You only get one life, and no woman should spend any part of it being friends with men. That’s not what men are for.”

The father of Saoirse’s daughter Pearl was only in Nenagh for one night with his rock band. Saoirse never saw him again. Saoirse cannot remember them even having sex that night. It must have happened while she was sleeping. Now she reads about him in the newspaper as his band has become quite famous.

“Always fight, Saoirse, won’t you? For yourself and for her. Don’t ever allow yourself to be trampled on.”

The men in this novel, and there are a few of them, are peripheral to the story, as these women must confront the world mainly on their own.

That the male author Ryan’s main focus is almost entirely on the women here is not the only unusual aspect of this work. Each very short chapter of this novel is close to exactly the same length, slightly less than two pages or 500 words long. Each of the 120 chapters is given a one-word title. The first chapter is titled ‘End’, and the last chapter is titled ”Beginning’. These constraints, apparently imposed by the novelist, give the novel it’s definite rhythm. And once a novel has established a rhythm, more than half the battle is won.

I happen to be one of those who believes that having constraints on the style or a restricted form, like in poetry, aids rather than hinders creativity. Having constraints to your writing makes you more creative, not less. This is definitely the case in ‘The Queen of Dirt Island’.

“The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.” – Orson Welles

The short two-page chapters made for a quick comfortable read. Many of these short chapters end with a severe twist at the end of them, a sudden death or an attempted murder or a missing child, etc. Perhaps there are too many of these severe twists for ‘The Queen of Dirt Island’ to be entirely realistic, but that’s OK too.

Grade:   A