The Naming of Eliza Quinn

Book Review

Carol Birch

The Naming of Eliza Quinn is Carol Birch's first novel since her Booker-longlisted Turn Again Home, and is likely going to garner her greater acclaim and a wider audience. It is a lush, atmospheric, and heart-felt novel, beautifully written and deftly constructed, as it shifts the narrative between three different time periods.

The first narrative belongs to Beatrice, an American living in New York at the end of the 1960s. When Beatrice suddenly learns that she's inherited a cottage by the sea somewhere in Ireland , she decides to abandon her friends – and the groovy Summer of Love – and move there, if only to check out her property to decide what to do with it.

Darby's House is a picturesque cottage on the coastline near Cork, isolated but flanked by one of those small villages where everyone knows you by name and everyone knows everyone else's business. In these surroundings, a throw-back to another era, Beatrice stands out. In spite of her lack of privacy in the village, Beatrice responds deep within her soul to the remoteness of her cottage, the wild sea crashing below, and the craggy cliffs around her.

One day, Beatrice, gazing upon an old oak tree in her garden, recalls an old poem about tree stumps, admonishing “do not put your hand to see…” Despite the remembered warning, Beatrice succumbs to her innate curiosity and reaches into the stump. She is shocked and horrified, intrigued and mesmerized, when her hand touches the small bones and skull of a small child hidden in the dark recesses of the old oak tree.

With her discovery, Beatrice's stay in the town of Kildarragh suddenly acquires a shape and purpose: to unravel the identity of the child and the story behind why its bones were placed in the tree behind Darby's House. Her research leads her through the local old boys in the pub and the town's amateur historian to Luke Quinn, who works at the saw mill. Luke is a strange misshapen young man, prickly in demeanor yet oddly gentle at his core. Beatrice gains Luke's trust, and is rewarded with an introduction to his Aunt Judith. Luke's mother believes that Aunt Judith is senile, but when Beatrice meets her, she discovers flashes of an alert mind still present. Judith reveals that Beatrice's mother may have been the love child of Lizzie Vesey and Judith's brother Tom Quinn. Beatrice and Luke may in fact be cousins.

At this point, the narrative picks up the story of Lizzie Vesey in the 1900s, when she is a young woman in full bloom, living with her parents in the town of Lissadoon.

Lizzie is vivacious and willful, obstinately forming a relationship with a tinker, Tom Quinn, taking a runt puppy from him and trying to sneak it into her parents' house. Eventually, she and Tom become lovers, although she is forbidden to see him because of ancient bad blood between the Veseys and the Quinns. When Lizzie becomes pregnant with Tom's child, her family quickly rallies to send her away to be married to a former suitor, avoiding scandal and separating Lizzie and Tom forever.

The third section of the narrative begins in 1845, and unearths the relationship between the two families, the Veseys and the Quinns, to understand why resentments persisted through the bloodlines to the present day, and why the baby's skull was hidden in Beatrice's tree stump.

The Naming of Eliza Quinn is a gorgeous, engrossing novel. Birch's prose is dark, without being sinister, moody and textured with a vivid atmosphere. Her characters pulse on the page and come alive in the reader's mind.

“Cigarettes are flirty things. OK. May as well go along with this. I accept his light, trying to catch his eye. Then the rain comes down steadily again, turning the sky above the rocks a beautiful sodden blue-gray; and it turns a little cold, but not unpleasantly so. I have a bottle of red wine I was keeping for something like this. I consider getting it out, but the silence between us grows so pure it seems a shame to break it. After ten minutes or so, he moves his head and locks eyes with me. His face has taken on a fixed, goblinish appearance, glazed, and he doesn't blink. I have known him all this time as shy, and now he does this, turns scary on a pin. I don't blink. We stare each other out for so long the world makes a change around us, infinitesimal.”

“Slowly, Eliza Quinn turns her face up to me and what I see there sends a panic thrill up my spine. Her face is dirty, smeared with tears and snot, but she smiles at me in a sudden ingratiating way. She has an odd little face. She's not bald any more but what she's got is wispy and colourless, so you can see the shape of her head, a pale nut shaped like an elongated onion. It's a vegetable head. I would not be surprised to see a bug creep from its ear. Why has she got my name? The panic is not that she is repulsive to me, but that her eyes themselves frighten me. What looks back is not human, nor is it animal. It's sly and dangerous and full of fun.

‘She's been a good girl,' says her mother fondly, smiling down at her, ‘and now she's a very very tired girl who should have stayed in her nice warm bed.'

In the Middle Kingdom, there is beauty beyond human beauty, and there is also, of course, wickedness and abomination. The thing I recognise looking out of the child's eyes is of this last kind. Juliander has her origins in the Middle Kingdom also, but she is noble and true and brave. It's not that she can't feel fear. She wouldn't be so brave if she didn't feel fear. She gets terribly scared, so scared that she cries and weeps and falls all the way down to the very darkest depths of the well. But she always gets up again. Finger's length by finger's length, she pulls herself back up to the light.

‘Are you all right, Eliza?' Sal says, breaking in on me. ‘You look a bit queer.'

‘I've had no sleep,' I say, blinking.

‘Neither have you. We're both in some half land.'

They go slowly on up the hill to their cabin. Eliza Quinn turns her head once as she walks, looking back at me over her left shoulder. She should not have my name. She can see Juliander. Creatures of the Middle Kingdom always recognize each other.”