Heap Earth Upon It
by Chloe Michelle Howarth
The novel opens with the O’Leary siblings – Tom, Jack, Anna, and Peggy – arriving in the village of Ballycrea on a pony cart. In 1965, rural Ireland is hardly a haven of wealth. However, even by these modest standards, the O’Learys are poor and desperately in need of settling down and earning a living—especially since Peggy is still a little girl. Thankfully, the Nevans – Bill and Betty – prosperous owners of a nearby farmstead, take the O’Learys under their wing. Bill offers Tom, the eldest, a job on the farm. Betty, who, now in her forties, has given up on having children, takes a liking to Peggy and assumes the role of surrogate mother to her, and a knowing companion to Anna. But Anna wants more than friendship from Betty and, as her obsession with the older woman deepens, dark secrets the O’Learys had hoped to bury begin to emerge.
Heap Earth Upon It is, in certain respects, a realist novel depicting the challenges of life in small-town Ireland in the 1960s through the psychology of its characters. However, Howarth harnesses Gothic tropes to great effect. The narrative is split between four characters – Tom, who casts himself as the responsible breadwinner, Jack, Anna, and Betty. All of the narrators, however, are unreliable. At best, they misunderstand themselves and others; at worst, they hide from or misrepresent the truth. The dark and claustrophobic atmosphere is charged with themes of Sapphic obsession and bursts of violence—real, remembered, or imagined. The ending, deliberately oblique, leaves it to the reader to decide what has truly happened.
This is an often
painful novel. Painful, I hasten to clarify, not because it is poorly written,
but, on the contrary, because it so powerfully evokes its characters’ yearning
for love and acceptance—a thirst so intense it ultimately leads to tragedy.
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