Breena Clarke's Blog: A Few Whiles - Posts Tagged "emer-martin"

The Cruelty Men by Emer Martin is a lovely lyrical, big chunk of a novel that is a wise and comprehensive narrative of Ireland. The title suggests that it will be a grim book. The events, the circumstances of the characters are harsh because the characters are the Irish and poor in Ireland. But the book is not grim. The book is written beautifully and that is just the pure fact. The narrative of Ireland is terribly grim and beautiful, and Emer Martin has found her way to telling it, to balancing the notions in a novel. If you read the first chapter, you will be on the hook for reading the rest. As big a story as it is though, it never overwhelms the reader or the characters. It uses short chapters narrated directly to the reader/listener to keep the reader hopping from one to the next. The narrative bounces between the characters as a crystal held to the sun and turned slightly reveals different colors in the same object. The story is intensely genealogic in almost a cruel way, a telling of how unalterable class division can be. The poor are trapped in a nearly unimaginable hell of ignorance, starvation, and predation while the middle classes remain blissfully unaware and the upper crust willfully unconcerned. The depths of the Catholic Churches’ outrages are plumbed. Oh, my goodness! Emer Martin has based her story on the accounts of survivors of the Industrial Schools and The Magdalene Laundries, as well as, as Irish oral traditions. And it is the age-old stories, carried on the lips of people who preserved them through memory and custom that have survived. Combining the elements of traditional oral narrative with the documented and witnessed accounts of survivors of The Industrial Schools and The Magdalene Laundries horrors is the magic of “The Cruelty Men.” The narratives are held together, are, and now the truth is known.

“When have the well-fed ever understood the hungry?” - Emer Martin